Ask An Author: "Should I write scenes sequentially, or in any order?"

Each week, a new author will serve as your Camp Counselor, answering your writing questions. Heather Mackey, our third counselor, is author of the upcoming middle-grade fantasy Dreamwood  (and married to NaNoWriMo executive director, Grant Faulkner!).

Is it better/easier to write your story sequentially or in pieces as ideas come to you regardless of the chronology of the events? — raven chasing

This is such a trick question, campers! I think it really depends on you and your story. Like the eternal pantsing versus plotting debate, there are pros and cons for each side.

Personally, I think it’s easier to write sequentially. I don’t like to start writing writing until I have a sense of where my beginning is. If I have my beginning I can usually see the other story milestones out there like distant mountain peaks. You want your beginning to give a sense of who your character is and then throw them off balance. Your beginning tells you your end. And it gives you a sense of what needs to happen in the middle to hinder and help your character along the way.

If you have a strong beginning, I think it’s ideal to write from one milestone to the next. It’s the same way your reader is going to progress through your story. Plus, I find it easier to set goals and award myself gold stars if I’m writing in sequence.

But sometimes you just don’t have enough information to write sequentially. Or sometimes it just feels super boring. You know there’s a really cool scene near the end, but you’re stuck in all this middle. Go ahead and write the milestone scenes, the scenes you know you need, then go in and backfill. You may discover you didn’t need those boring scenes after all.

Even though I just said I prefer to write sequentially, I’m actually working on a project that (sigh) is proceeding less linearly. I’m writing down scenes as they come, and I’m all over the place.

Aside from the strong possibility I might be wandering in the fiction wilderness for years, the downside of writing out of sequence is that somehow I’ve got to keep track of all these pieces and eventually wrestle them into shape. Some people list their scenes down on index cards and shuffle them around until they find the right order. I’ve been using a tool like Scrivener to manage all my scraps. My hope is that I’ll get enough down this way that I’ll be able to take my super rough draft and smooth it out—in sequence, of course.

Next week, we have our final Camp Counselor, Kat Zhang, author of the Hybrid Chronicles, a young adult series. Ask her your questions here!