To Write in Order or To Not Write in Order

Today's blog post on writing is based on something I've been thinking a lot about recently; writing a story in the sequence in which the plot occurs or writing scenes out of order. I've done both and here to tell you my experience and which system I think works best.

Writing in order

I had my first published novel To Catch a Rebel all plotted out from beginning to end, though I did end up changing the ending and wrote it from beginning to end in that order. I have to say that was easy since I had an outline and I knew what was coming next and the times when I didn't ( and there were quite a few of those times), it was easy to look back on what I had already written and figure out where things could go from there.

I'm going to take a gamble and say that this is the way most books are written because it's so easy. It's a good method for all you pansters out there, just figuring out what comes next in your plot.

Writing out of order

I wrote my second novel in my YA dystopian series, To Raise a Banner partly out of order meaning I had a lot of rearranging of scenes and whole chapters to do. and the third book To Cause a Reckoning (coming out this June) completely out of order.

I did this because, to be honest, I was finding it hard to get the motivation to write the whole book when I thought of going chapter by chapter. There were some scenes I was excited to write and character interactions I was just hungry to write but they were so far off in the middle of the story and it wouldn't make sense for the plot if I moved them sooner. S what did I do instead?

I wrote all those scenes I really was excited to write about first. Let me tell you, that it made the process more fun because I was looking forward to those scenes, and once I had those down I could figure out how each of the scenes and chapters connected with each other. However there is a downside to this, there is a hell load of rearranging that needs to be done even more revising and you also have to go back to make sure that everything, lines up with each other and makes sense and if you've written all the fun parts of your novel first there might not be many more fun things to look forward to and that's not a bad thing, just something to consider.

The Verdict

So after all that, what would I suggest? Well, I'd say that writing in orde is easier but somethings a story doesn't flow that well unless you can see things from another point of view which may require writing some scenes out of order to see what works and what doesn't.

So do like to write in order or out of order? Let me know below in the comments.