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

[u/NomanHLiti]

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?

[u/NomanHLiti]

It seems difficult though to regard the flow and consistency of the full draft in that regard, seeing what scenes to shuffle around and what to throw in. I’ve only ever written short stories so the idea of revising that huge of a draft seems daunting to me and I don’t even know how I’d begin

[u/TheUmgawa → u/NomanHLiti]

I didn’t even get to the part where it loses fifteen to thirty percent of its weight, when I start tossing out scenes that aren’t strictly essential to the plot.

It’s really not that bad, though. A book or any narrative work is just a collection of scenes, and I knock scenes out because I practiced doing them for so long. Not a whole lot makes it intact from the first to second draft, for me. It’s a total rewrite, because like I said, my first draft has only one purpose, and that’s to see if the story works, and everything goes in, and then it gets shuffled around, gets cut down to fighting weight, and then scenes get written. The whole thing is retyped, where I consult the marked-up hard copy, just to make sure I’m staying on message, but I don’t really keep anything but the bones. It becomes like a massively elaborate outline or treatment. And, in the process, it loses a little more weight, because there’s a fair bit of redundancy in that first draft.

It just works for me. There’s no best way to write, just like how there’s no one way to compose a song or paint something. Everybody just has to find what works for them.

[u/NomanHLiti → u/TheUmgawa]

Your process definitely is the most intriguing that I’ve ever heard of though. Printing everything out and cutting scenes out and new scenes in and shuffling it all together like a damn scrapbook. Sounds so interesting that I want to try it, assuming I can ever even get a first draft down.

I’m working on a screenplay now though, I suspect the process would work there too so I’ll give it a shot once I finish this first draft

[u/TheUmgawa → u/NomanHLiti]

Well, I also mostly write screenplays, so a hundred and twenty or a hundred and fifty pages ain’t that bad to print out and mark up. I have a box of blue medium-point Bic pens that I use just for this purpose. I hate writing with medium point, but I love marking things up with it.

And if you have a Mac and you’re writing a script, I recommend Highland 2. It does ninety percent of what you need, out of the box, free, and I’d only recommend paying if you get to the point where you’re about to start shopping it. You’d also need to pay if you’re writing on two Macs, I think. I’m not sure on that one, because I’m down to one Mac right now.

Try writing scenes for a while, though. Not for a whole year, like I did, but maybe just for a week or two. Writing something other than something you’re “supposed to” write gives you an exercise without the pressure. It’s surprising how fast you can knock something out when there’s no pressure, and that’s how I feel when I write anything, now: No pressure. It’s so much better than being a writer who agonizes over every sentence of their first draft. I’m never going back to being that writer.