Out of Order

Reading a book you start at page one, and read forward until you get to the words THE END on page… whatever.

But that doesn’t mean the book was written in that same order, and it’s certainly not the case with my current work in progress, Trial by Fire.

The first draft of this 14th Sanford 3rd Age Club Mystery is about half complete and well on target for a summer release. I began by writing chapters 1, 2 and 3. After that, I moved on to chapters 13, 14 and 15, then up to chapters 21 and 22, then back to chapters 16, and finally back to 4 and 5. About half way through 5, I made a start on chapter 6.

Good friend, Carol Hedges made a point on her blog a few months ago that crime writers do it backwards by which, of course, she meant that you have to know whodunit and how they dunit before you can work on the beginning. Carol takes this a stage further by writing the last page first.

I’m not quite like that, but when I begin I always know where I’m going and how it will end. That the ending often changes before I get there, is another matter. Writing the back end first allows me to plug any gaps that may otherwise be created as I go along. And it’s the same with these jumps in the narrative. If I have Joe in a tight spot at the end of chapter three, I jump to chapter 14 to get him out of that spot, and the ensuing chapters take that part of the story a little further.

Meanwhile, back at chapter three, the screws need to be tightened further, to rack up the pressure, which inevitably means going to chapter 13 to hint at a release of that pressure, which will come in chapter 14.

And naturally as the clues keep stacking up, I tend to forget them, so I may as well go to chapters 21 and 22, effectively the end of the book, and write those to ensure I don’t forget anything.

If it all sounds a bit haphazard, it’s because it is, but I store every chapter as a separate file, and only when they are all written, do I put them together as a single document and start the edits.

That’s when the real madness sets in.