What order do you (should you) write your novel in?
What are the pros and cons of drafting in the order the reader will read your book, versus writing whichever part of the story you want to write? And what do other authors do?
A longstanding writer friend of mine used to have a clothes line in their office, and a bag of pegs. They would write what they envisaged as the main elements of their story, however they occurred to them and they felt like writing them, then print out the texts, peg them up, and spend as long moving them around as it took to find the right order for the story as the reader would read it. Then they knitted it all togetheer.
These days they use Scrivener and do the whole thing virtually, but their process hasn’t changed.
Other writers (full disclosure: including me) start at what they at the moment envisage as their Page One, and keep writing forwards until they reach what they at the moment envisage as The End. However much they might leave details to be filled in, and even though they later cut, add, change or transpose many elements, the foundations of the text are constructed in the same order as the reader will encounter them.
Other writers again have different hybrids of these two basic approaches, particularly if they write novels with non-linear narratives, when the order that the physical book lays out the text for the reader to read is not the order in which the events occur during the timeline of the story.
This post starts by thinking about the likely pros and cons of writing in-reading-order, and writing out-of-reading-order, and what that means for your own process, including planners, pansters and those of us who write non-linear narratives. It ends by bringing in the voices of many writer friends about how they do things, to help you sort out what works best for you, and for your different projects.
First Draft Written in Reading Order
Advantages:
It’s easier to keep the plot - the chain of cause-and-effect - working properly and convincingly.
It’s easy to stay clear on what the reader does, and doesn’t, know at any given point, and continuity slips and horrors are less likely.
The writing experience stays close(ish) to the reading experience and it’s easier to judge pace, scale and structure.
If you’re a planner, and know what comes next, you can hope it won’t need too much wrangling in second draft for everything to fit together.
If you’re a pantser, and don’t know what comes next, you can trust your storyteller’s instinct to lead you organically towards the next thing, in a way which should also feel natural to the reader.
With non-linear narratives, you stay closer to the reader’s experience of the connections and transitions between the different threads.
Disadvantages:
You have to write the next bit, even if it’s boring, you’re not feeling connected to it, you’re not sure what it should be, or you’re lacking a piece of research you can’t do yet.
You may tend to ‘write your way in’ to the main story, and only later discover just how much of the early text isn’t wanted.
If you’re a planner, what you planned for crises and climaxes may turn out to be unsatisfactory when you actually try to write them. When you change the plan for these later stages, everything that was heading for them now needs reworking, which can be quite a job.
If you’re a pantser, you can find you’ve written huge amounts that turn out to be not what’s wanted at all.
With non-linear narratives, you may struggle to keep each thread consistent and convincing with the previous instalment, when you last worked on that thread weeks or months ago.
First Draft Written Out of Reading Order
Advantages:
You can write whichever section of the story you currently see most clearly, are most sure about, or have the most energy and desire to write.
By first writing later sections which are a defining part of the story, you will know what the earlier ones need to be working towards.
If there’s research for a scene that you can’t do yet, you can work on other things till you’ve done it.
If some sections will be emotionally tough to write, you can hold back on those till you have the space, resilience or resources to cope.
If you’re a planner, you can hope that the scenes you write will be a reasonable fit for that part of the story, and won’t need much rejigging.
If you’re a pantser, you can hope that being able to put your energy into whatever seems like a good idea to write will keep you energised for the long haul.
With non-linear narratives, you can write all or several instalments of a single thread all in one, and only figure out the strongest places to chop it up and weave it in once you know what it is.
Disadvantages:
If you’ve written all the scenes you have most energy and excitement about first, motivating yourself to write all the dull linky bits after that can be very difficult.
Continuity slips and confusions are almost inevitable.
Working out how everything fits together, and knitting it all up, in second draft can be a real headache.
The research you haven’t done yet, so haven’t written that scene, might have informed other scenes - but you’ve already written them and changing things demands loads of not always mutually compatible tweaks
If you’re a planner it helps, but you may still find that many links of cause and effect don’t actually work properly and are hard to see clearly and sort out.
If you’re a pantser, even just working out what you’ve got, let alone knitting-it-all-up stage, can be an absolutely nightmare.
With non-linear narratives, you lose touch with the reader’s experience of switching between the two threads, so may not realise when things get confusing, or you’re asking too much of the reader’s effort.
What Does This Mean For Your Process?
Clearly, there’s no one right or wrong way, and I suspect it’s also affected by whether you’re a crazy-first-draft writer, or one who tends to write-and-revise as you go, and how big the gaps are between writing sessions. And genres whose plots need precise engineering and depend a lot on suspense and who-knows-what-when (including the reader) are maybe harder to write out-of-reading-order.
As with everything about your writing process, the key is to
understand the advantages and disadvantages of the different approaches
think about your default process, and ask if a different one might serve you better
decide what to do for this project
make the most of the the advantages, and do your best to mitigate the drawbacks.
These Itch of Writing posts might help:
Other Writers on How They Write
So I asked about among my writer friends - between them they write genres including crime, women’s fiction, thriller, children’s, horror, romance, scifi and literary fiction and memoir, and are a mixture of million-sellers, self-publishers and midlisters - and got an interesting variety of responses.
I’ve divided them into in-reading-order writrs, and out-of-reading-order writers, but you’ll see that it’s not really as binary as that. Some writers mix and match between the two processes, for certain stages of developing the draft, certain structural moments, or certain kinds of story. For Kate Armstrong the form she’s writing comes into it: fiction is different from memoir.
Have a browse, and see what resonates with you - but whatever you do at the moment, you are not alone! Having said that, as ever, if you encounter a process which doesn’t merely not-resonate, but actually fills you with furious horror, it’s worth having a think about what fears it has brought up. Is that a useful insight about this, or other aspects of your writing?
Always or usually in-order-of-reading
Ruth Ware: I write strictly in order, because I think with crime it’s very hard to hold in your head what the reader knows if you’re not following the breadcrumbs along with them.
Laura Shepherd-Robinson: I cannot begin to conceive of writing a book out of order. I find it mindblowing that people do this!
Rowan Coleman: I can only write in order!
Roz Morris: I draft [in] the structure I feel the reader should have. But I change it a lot in editing… I might decide a scene should come later because the same events would have more power.
Helen Grant: I always write in the order in which the book will be read. That does mean that if I have difficulties with a certain bit, I am stuck there until I resolve them, and this is an issue that has bothered me in the past. So with my current WIP I decided to do all the logistical thinking *first* and write a full synopsis, which I would then write to. The synopsis ran to eight pages. The book is going quite quickly.
Kate Machon: I usually write in order, but if I get stuck on a scene or exactly how a situation is going to play out, I will jump ahead to the next section which is clear in my head, and backfill the gap later.
Daniel Blythe: I always try to write roughly in order, but always end up going off in different directions.
Rowena House: Tried out-of-order several times with early drafts and failed. That said, developing the story put it out of order as I massaged the first half to build to a revised denouement.
Rebecca Mascull: I always tend to write in the order it’s read, mostly because I plan extensively before writing, so it’s all there already to write from. If I’ve had two parallel narratives, I’ve written the two separately and put them together, but only when I had a mystery plot where I really needed to see the line of enigma throughout each strand.
Rod Duncan: I try to write in order. The process is complex enough for me without the added issue having to hold a different sequence in my mind from the one that is on the page. This may be influenced by my neurodiversity - since dyslexics are often said to have problems with sequencing. I make extensive use of the ‘document map’ facility of MS Word to give me a visual experience of the sequence of the whole manuscript.
Cath Nichols: In order, then shuffle things around if I want to tell things out of order. If two time periods I might write the ‘now’ one first then the historic one - that’s maybe the only occasion I write out of order. If I don't follow chronological time I would be hopelessly lost!... Once I have most of it there, I might write inserts out of order because by them I know where things lie.
Sheenagh Pugh: I think my two novels were mostly in order, but if I had research to do on a particular chapter, or was stuck somewhere with it., I did sometimes write ahead. With the second one I had to be careful about chronology when doing that, in fact I even created a spreadsheet of what was happening when…I didn’t want bluebells out in October or a twelve-month pregnancy.
Leigh Russell: I start at the beginning and keep going until I reach the end of the story. Anything else would get me in a terrible muddle.
Nick Sweet: I start at the beginning and take it from there. Generally I don’t see very far ahead, so it's a matter of finding out what happens as I write.
M G Harris: Plan extensively and write in order. Might be fun to try a different order!
Lin Treadgold: I have often swapped chapters around but generally I just write it as it comes out of my head.
Ruby Speechley: I write my thrillers in order, summarise each chapter on index cards to check pace, events in different POVs etc and sometimes move chapters around at the editing stage.
Emma Darwin: If I don’t write in reading-order I get hopelessly confused with timelines and, crucially, what the reader does and doesn’t know - though a lot gets switched around in editing. The only time I didn’t was in The Mathematics of Love, where each chapter has a short tailpiece. The voice of those is quite different, so to keep it consistent, I wrote the whole lot in one go, then stitched their echoes and references into the two main narratives.
Always or usually not in order of reading
Julie Cohen: I’ve written a few novels in a different order than the way the reader will encounter them. The most obvious one is Together, which is told backwards, but I wrote it forwards and then rearranged it. But with several other novels that have had separate and alternate timelines, or significant backstories, or multiple points of view, I’ve often written each timeline or backstory or POV separately and then interwoven them in the edits. I do plan the novel in its final form first, but in these cases I write in a different order than in the final draft.
Kate Armstrong: The two novels I’ve written I wrote start to finish - i.e. fully in order. My memoir I ‘plotted out’ and wrote out of order (mostly as I became emotionally resilient enough to face each section of the content).
R N Morris: For the first time ever I seem to be writing a novel out of sequence. I’m not sure why I’m doing it, just that it feels the right thing to do this time!
Kat Devereaux: I always write dual POV and/or dual timeline, and I will generally get well into writing one before I go back and start weaving in the other. I find it useful to stay in my principal protagonist’s headspace for a while, and it also helps ensure that the two narrative strands fit together as closely as they ought.
Loree Westron: I usually know how the story begins and ends, so I write those scenes first. In the novel that's about to be published, I wrote scenes and chapters as they came to me (minimal plotting involved).
Teika Bellamy: I [normally] write in order, but with my latest [commission] I was in a low place…So I eased myself into it by first writing the scenes that were most emotional, and which most reflected my own emotional state at the time. Very slowly it started coming together, but I’ll be honest, I found it a challenge to stitch together and to get all the scenes in the right order.
Clodagh Murphy: I always write out of order. It’s just the way I’ve always done it and I sometimes wish it wasn’t. I’ve tried to write in order, but never get very far. The advantage for me is that it makes drafting quicker as I can jump around and write the scenes I’m most excited about, that are fully formed in my head. The disadvantage is that when it comes to rewriting/editing I’m left with all the less fun stuff like transitions, adding action to dialogue, scene setting, etc. I can get carried away writing pages of dialogue, for instance, but then have to go back and put the characters into a place and a time and add some action so it doesn’t read like a radio play. Another disadvantage is that I can end up with a scene that I love but ends up not fitting anywhere, no matter how much I try to shoehorn it in.
Sally Nicholls: I write out of order. I always have - it dates back to being a little girl walking around my primary school playground writing dramatic extra scenes from the books I was reading.
For me, the advantages are that I can write the scenes that are most vivid in my imagination first, and I can write in a way that suits my mood - if I’m feeling like an action scene I can write that first and so on. If I’m stuck with a particular scene, I can miss it out and come back to it later. I often find that when I’ve written more about a character, I’ve found out the things I need to know about them to finish that difficult scene. Often the problem is that I didn’t know the character well enough to get them out of that hole. Sometimes I come back and find I don’t need the scene at all. My earliest scenes will often be key bits of character development or backstory that help flesh out the character. The advantage is that first drafts are much easier to write. The disadvantage is that second drafts are a pain in the proverbial. I often find that I’ve got three scenes that basically do the same thing, but one important bit of information isn’t there at all. I need to write a lot of linking scenes to convey the passing of time. And do a lot of deleting.
This style also reflects the sort of books I write. I often have short chapters and a lot of self-contained scenes. I’ve written one epistolary novel, and another which is diary entries. I have written novels which are more free-flowing, but these tend to be shorter.
When I talk about this with groups of writers, I usually get 15 baffled faces and one person going ‘Yes! I thought I was the only one!’ I think it’s a style that choses the writer rather than one I’d suggest people chose - I can’t really write any other way. One thing which may be helpful for other writers, however, is skipping over a scene you don’t know how to write, putting a placeholder sentence like “HE ESCAPES THE CELL” and coming back to it when you know the characters better. I often suggest this to teenagers who find themselves stuck in chapter 3 and don’t know how to move past the block.
Sam Burns: I write almost everything out of order then edit in order. I will have a skeletal plot crib in the draft, in reading order, but I'll fill it in in whatever order I fancy, often starting with the conclusion. (I used to read books back to front as a child sometimes too.)
Catherine Cooper: Mine are not in order. Scrivener is brilliant for moving things around later. I mainly do it to stave off boredom and if I get stuck on where one thread is going I can move to something else. I’m not sure I’d recommend it as such it’s just what works for me!
Matthew Francis: I don’t plan much and don’t write in order. The shape emerges gradually. I don’t even write an orderly succession of drafts - I work at one till it breaks down, usually less than halfway through, start again, salvaging anything I can from the previous one and so on until I finally know what I’m doing, after which it all falls into place quite quickly.
Louise Walters: I usually like to start with the start (or what is planned as the start) just to set the tone and feel in my mind. I sometimes then jump to the next big scene. Jumping around a bit can be helpful If I’m stuck on one particular scene. Mooching off to another part of the story can be really helpful, for all sorts of reasons: plot hole fixing, new ideas to take back to earlier scenes or chapters, that sort of thing. I write short first drafts, really skeletons of the novel which I then have to flesh out. At that stage I am definitely jumping all over the place.
Myfanwy Fox: At the end of a complicated novel, my three main characters were separated and had a lot going on but needed to cross paths (missing), or find one another at important moments. I wrote each character separately and then edited according to my vital events timeline, which was sketched out on a piece of A3 kid’s drawing paper (after several scribbled drafts). The final edit had each character appearing in sections interspersed. It was absolutely fiendish while I was getting my head around it all but really worth the challenge.
Judi Moore: Recently I’ve been doing a lot of drafting at workshops, where we write to a prompt, 2 pieces a week maybe 500 words each. Now I am stitching these together for various pieces of long and longish fiction. It is a bally headache to do, but the stories do develop quickly in my head. Perhaps oddly, I don’t find them difficult to hold in the mind, nor get them confused. The only frustration is that I can’t work on them all simultaneously, and they do take a long time to sort out.
Kath McGurl: I write dual timeline fiction, in which a historical mystery is uncovered and resolved in the present day. I alternate the two stories each chapter. I usually write the first few chapters, then push ahead with the historical story to the end, then come back and slot in the contemporary storyline. I also tend to write chunks of backstory in one hit, and slot those in to the overall novel later. So no, I don’t write it in the order readers will read it at all! I once tried writing it in the final sequence but found it hard to keep swapping from one story to the other while writing. Prefer to focus on one at a time. And on another occasion I tried writing the contemporary first. But when I got to the point where the characters needed to discover the truth about the past, I couldn’t write it because I didn’t know it myself, because I hadn’t written it yet. So I’ve not tried that again.