becketted:

billybonez:

me: this scene is so boring i wish i could write this other scene i’m really excited about instead 

brain: you can

me: explain how

brain: 

Seriously I think this is one of the biggest reasons people get stuck writing a story, and I wish it was one of the first things creative writing teachers told their students. That you don’t have to write scenes chronologically, you can write whatever the hell you want, skip scenes, and then come back. I’ve been writing non-chronologically for a long, long times, and seriously I don’t know how people can write their stuff chronologically.

In fact, writing non-chronologically have extra advantages that can help make your writing stronger:

If you write non-chronologically when you go back to “fill the gaps” you actually actively work to build connections between the scenes, because you have to go from A to B and you know, so the scenes actually connect, organically, you are not just adding stuff.

You know where the story goes, so when you go back to fill the gaps you’ll find out that it’s easier to come up with the stuff that’s in between, you have a clear goal writing. This is helpful to me because I don’t do outlines (unless it’s general ones for very long stuff), because I personally find that they don’t help me come up with scenes organically. So if you don’t do outlines writing non-chronologically is a good way of paving the road for your story, of knowing where you are going at every moment.

Also! Writing non-chronologically will give you a better sense of the structure of your story, and what’s more it will help you have a stronger structure, because you set the high points (the scenes you’re excited to write) clearly.

(pfft, talk for another day but: those scenes you don’t feel like writing? the ones you want to skip? they probably shouldn’t be in the story and you should learn how to write around them)