I wasn’t too successful when I attempted National Novel-Writing Month last year. I had a few ideas, but the story didn’t write; I hadn’t pushed it hard enough to get it to start writing itself the way some of my older projects had. This year, though, I didn’t have the excuses I had before. I had time, I had inclination: this year, I decided, would be different. But, as with the last project, I ran into a number of problems with the scenes I was working on. How could I keep up my momentum?
I decided to make use of one of the greatest advantages a novel has over a tabletop game: the ability to write out of order. To skip from a scene on which I’m frozen to a scene I have ideas for. To figure out the conclusion, and then come back to the setup. Someone reading the longhand version of my current arc would go through more, and more irregular, time travel than an average Dr. Who episode, but it’s working; I’ve gone far beyond any of my previous efforts.
Why did–why can–nonsequential writing work so well?
The easy answer is “in order t0 circumvent writer’s block.” I’ve learned from prior experience, particularly on blog posts, that block feeds on itself: if you’re stuck, you start dwelling on the fact that you’re stuck, and that further crowds out the thoughts that are going to get you un-stuck. Getting a little momentum somewhere else in the story gives you a little extra force to get through the scene you’re blocked on, and gives your subconscious a chance to worm its way through whatever problem is keeping you from moving forward.
Another use for nonsequential writing is figuring out what events are needed in order to set up a later scene. This is one of my current project’s main sources of scene-skip: what began as a simple little revenge plot rapidly turned into a clash of hidden agendas, and every time I skipped forward I found another scene that I needed to splice in as setup, another hidden motivation that I needed to slip in some subtext for in a scene I’d already written or one I hadn’t quite finished. If I’d just gone in order, with my vague feeling for how this arc would end, I would have lost a lot of what’s making this one so much fun.
Sometimes, you just need something that’s in a later scene. A chance to refresh yourself on a character’s voice before it fades from your memory entirely. To escape from another character for a while. To write a kind of scene that you really like to write. To do something that the next scene won’t allow.
That isn’t to say that nonsequential writing is without its own hazards. With scenes at all sorts of points on the timeline, it can be easy to forget what hasn’t happened yet and what’s already happened, not to mention the occasional issue of not being entirely sure where on the timeline a given scene goes. There’s a strong chance that when you’re coming back to an earlier scene you’ll write something that contradicts a later one, and have to deal with reconciling the two. And of course, writers who motivate themselves by curiosity shouldn’t write the ending first: I learned that the hard way a few years ago! But for a writer who can keep all these hazards in mind, nonsequential writing can be an excellent way to shake away the problems that might otherwise stop a story entirely.
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Writing out of sequence is one thing I’ve just never been able to do. Well, almost never; I did write the first two chapters of RTH out of order because I was really stuck on how to get across the situation in the first chapter, whereas I knew exactly what needed to be in the second. But any further ahead than that, I simply get stuck by the thought that I can’t write what happens in this chapter without knowing what comes in the chapters before it.
Certainly, whenever I’m working on a story (since, in your terms, I have an event-based inspiration style) I often see particular future events, especially the ending, in detail. Even so, I feel that actually writing the event requires more than that: the way it’s presented, the nuances of what the characters say to each other, will be affected by the precise detail of what’s gone before, detail that I either haven’t seen yet or know is likely to change drastically as I write it. If I try, it ends up feeling false; I can’t make the characters talk as they would talk in that situation without having a firm grasp on exactly how they got there. I know that this isn’t nearly as big a problem as it sounds, because after all I am writing a first draft and anything can still be changed; yet somehow I am still held back and I cannot seem to think myself around that block.
The other problem is — well, what you said about not writing the ending first. Really, I think that applies to any of the scenes I’ve imagined in detail a long time in advance. If I try writing those scenes too soon, they’re not still there for me to have the satisfaction of calling them into existence; I would be left with filling in the duller parts, and my inevitable feeling of discontent would probably end up making those parts dull for the reader as well.
Of course, all of this is just my own feelings; I’m not trying to put anyone else off writing non-sequentially!
In my case, I think one of the things that helped was not skipping too far ahead. Mostly, what would happen is that if I got stuck I’d stick in a placeholder, a bit of “come back to this later”, then rush on to the next scene. At one point, though, I realized that while none of my scenes were coming together because I couldn’t quite grasp what they were setting up–and I discovered that one of the characters I had back there was oh, so very alive. If I’ve got one of those characters in a scene, I can write almost anything. So I needed to get to her asap…. it’s more complicated than that, but I have a plane to board right now, so I’ll see if I can get to it later!
I skip around a lot, but normally what I skip too and from are asides of a sort. Sure Wadi falling off a horse has no bearing on the plot at large but it does help keep me plus days rather than minus days in NaNoWriMo. Usually those of these that get cut in revision end up tied up with a bow and presented as short stories to share with friends. So rather than specifically going forwards or backwards in time, I step out of the main timestream and write something else. A good example from last year is The Sun ranting about Daylight Savings Time. Almost always I learn something about characters and/or setting in the process.