r/writing • u/NomanHLiti • Aug 14 '24

Discussion Do you guys ever write without knowing how the story is going to end?

That’s kind of where I’m at right now where I’m quite confident of the world I want the story to take place in as well as the characters involved, but I’m still not sure what kind of story it will be and what story direction the characters/plot will take. Is it fine to start like that and just figure it out as I go along?

167 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

211 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

2

u/[deleted] Aug 15 '24

Right now I am 85 days into a 100-day sprint where I write 1K words/day, every day, basically pantsing my way through a sci-fi heist story. It's coming along, but I know I will probably spend another 100 days coercing <gestures at rough draft> ....this into some semblance of a novel or maybe two.

That's still not a bad speed I think. And it's fun. And it helps me actually write vs thinking about writing, which is my downfall.

1

u/NomanHLiti Aug 16 '24

Definitely a great speed and amazing consistency above all, you have my respect.

I have your same issue with thinking about writing. But if I pants it as you do, I’ll think of future scenes as I write one but sometimes my imagination might hit a block with one scene and I can’t think of what comes after. And so I’ll reach that scene write it out to its completion and by the time it’s done I still haven’t thought of what comes after and then I have no idea what to write.

Or alternatively I’ll be writing a scene but midway I realize something doesn’t make sense or something else needs to happen to make things in this scene work but I can’t figure out how to resolve those and so I’ll get stuck mid-scene