a question for writers

[cellio]

This question is directed toward two groups: people who have completed fiction works, and people doing NaNoWriMo (national novel-writing month).

How do you structure your writing? Do you write your story linearly from beginning to end (not counting editing passes)? Or do you jump around, leaving place-holders for things you'll fill in later?

My impression, based on only a few data points, is that people doing NaNoWriMo tend to start at the beginning and write the story in order. (NaNoWriMo is all about cranking out the initial draft in a short period of time, so editing is discouraged.) I write fiction rarely and as a hobby only, but I've found that I tend to jump around somewhat -- I may start out writing linearly, but then I'll insert something like "[wild night in bar goes here]" so I can write the next part, because I'm not feeling inspired to write about wild nights right now but I do have inspiration for the aftermath. Do people who write fiction more seriously do that, or am I just quirky?

I find myself wondering whether NaNoWriMo builds productive habits, encourages destructive habits, or is just plain orthogonal to conventional writing.

Comments

[jducoeur]

Hmm. I'm probably a non-sequiteur here, but for reference:

I always write in a highly free-associative way, but I'm mainly focused on writing LARPs. My serious writing is generally in 1-15 page chunks which are massively interconnected, often with the same event told from multiple viewpoints. So I'll generally build everything holistically, doing the actual writing only after doing massive outlining. (And even when I'm doing the writing, often flipping around and rewriting six other pages while I'm working on this one.)

I'm pretty sure that, if I tried to write something linear, I'd still wind up doing much this sort of process. Closest I've come was a play that is just barely started but outlined at a pretty detailed level by now, which had just this sort of design phase first.

This is, of course, why I decided to build a customized Wiki environment for myself -- it's the only reasonable way to keep track of what I'm doing...