Writing out of Order

Today I’m going to address something that is currently helping me out immensely in continuing my rough draft of Laz: Writing scenes out of order.

If you have experience in writing novels, you may be thinking well, duh, but writing out of order was something that I was dead set against when I first started on Laz. I thought I could just power through it, cover to cover, without ever needing to write different parts before they came chronologically.

I was wrong, as I often am, but that’s just part of learning, right?

I had a few reasons for not wanting to write out of order, but really it all just boiled down to fearing that if I did, I wouldn’t be able to connect the scenes properly. I didn’t want to be left with a disjointed final result. However, even if it would come out a little choppy, choppy is better than nothing as far as rough drafts are concerned.

Not writing out of order was a dangerous thing to do, because it was not long after I started Laz that I became stuck. Like, really stuck. This was my first serious run-in with writer’s block. So instead of writing out of order, (because I didn’t allow myself to) I thought about the stuff I should have been writing for a long time. Three years to be exact. During these three years, I thought about how I could make certain scenes better, or alter little details to make the settings more realistic, which is something writers need to do, but it’s better to finish a rough draft before you edit too much. So much time passed, with so many different ideas passing through my mind that I almost lost the original concepts that make Laz what it is.I couldn’t bring myself to write the scenes that happen later in the book, and it nearly destroyed the work I’d done.

All of this, I now realize was really because I think I was afraid of writing crucial scenes, and having them turn out worse than they are in my head, and finding out that I’m actually a crappy writer.

One day I got so frustrated with not writing that I decided to write a scene from the end of the book, a short conversation scene I’d agonized over for a very long time, and was surprised to find that the words just flowed out of me. Was it perfect? No. But I had words on a page that weren’t there before, and that meant that I was a little closer to completing a draft.

in addition to helping me to maintain the general direction that I want to take the story in, writing scenes out of order has been helping me to write regularly, which I believe is also very important. Got stuck somewhere? Jump to another scene! Or I go back to somewhere I skipped earlier on. Just put words down, and get closer to having a completed draft.

So lesson learned: Don’t be afraid to write out of order. Things rarely turn out as well as you’d like the first time around, but you can always go back and change what’s written. Just remember that it’s important to have a first draft to work with before you start changing things around too much. Write first, edit after.