When most people sit down to write something, they typically go through the same fundamental process. With a basic idea in mind, they start with the beginning, penning that first sentence and that first paragraph. Then, they continue with writing the middle, fleshing out that initial idea until they feel like they’ve made the point they wanted to make. Finally, they wrap up the piece of writing with some sort of conclusion.
This writing process is quite common, regardless of the exact time of writing. It could be an email message, a blog post, or an academic essay. You start in the beginning, you work on the middle, and you finish up the end… but is that really the best way to go about things, especially if you want to make a career out of writing? Do you really need to write from beginning to end, in that exact order?
The Argument for Writing in Order
To put it simplest, the main reason why you want to write in order is that it’s the easiest way to do things. You start at the beginning and just start typing. When you’re done, you’re done.
What’s more, we also have to recognize that people are generally going to read in order too. When you write from beginning to end, especially in a single session, you’re more likely to get into a flow. The writing may not feel as disjointed, because the reader is following your train of thought in a singular direction.
The Argument for Following Your Inspiration
But writing in order is not always the best idea. For starters, it’s very easy to ramble on with no real destination in mind. The writing starts to lack meaning and direction, because it has not been properly organized, meandering from one tangent to the next.
The mind does not usually function in a linear fashion either, oftentimes jumping from one idea to the next. In this way, it might make the most sense to follow your inspiration, writing about what comes to mind first. You can later sort through those thoughts and put them in a logical order.
Indeed, the hardest part of writing is getting started. This might be because we are trying to force ourselves to write an introduction to a work where we haven’t really explored the “meat” of the argument yet. That’s why some writers advocate writing the introduction (and deciding on a title) as the last step, rather than the first.
No Right or Wrong Answer
At the end of the day, should you write in order or not? Well, it depends. Under some circumstances, it might make the most sense to go from beginning to middle to end, but in other instances, like writing a review, it might make more sense to set an outline and jump from section to section. For my part, I use a combination of both these strategies, using what works best under the conditions of the project.
Each writer has his or her own way of doing things. For instance, here’s how author Jerry Jenkins writes his books. What about you? When you write a blog post, ebook, academic essay, formal report, cover letter, or any other piece of writing, do you tend to go in order or do you jump from section to section and back again?
I personally write from start to finish writing things in flow until complete. The thing I do different is that I do put all of my ideas on the paper as they come to mind, then go back to edit them into a more logical sequence. The editing normally takes a fair amount of time, so I guess I mix methods.
For short comments or emails it’s more concise, with blog posts or some of my longer comments here I take a good deal of time. As you say, there is no right or wrong.
So I’m a hobbyist novel writer and my stories tend to become pretty complicated(many elements to work out) and I began writing when I was 13(10 years ago) but I wasn’t really planning my stories. I just went and wrote what came up. At one point I realized that there was no structure in my story at all, just tons of things happening piled upon one another… So I started plotting my next story from begin to end. And that’s what I’ve been doing until it became a habbit to just plot out a new story and… move on to plotting another story.
So now, recently, I decided this was hopeless and I went back to one of the stories I was more dedicated to(A few stories stuck and I tried multiple times to work on them) and just… started writing. I knew so much about the story and I had so much files about what happens when and where… but once I got started I realized much was still missing and many plots werend tied.
So here’s my solution: Plot it out, work on the storyline and struture the scenes for a while untill you think you have quite a bunch of data and then you just start at the beginning(I stopped writing the chapters out of order so they would fit better) of the story and as you go you will probably realize more and more about the story(because it only really comes to live when you actually write the story) and when you finish a chapter of(depending on the length) part of the chapter you take some time to work out the new realizations/developments into the bigger picture of your story.
I use to have much difficulty organizing all that data that I had, especially the storyline and its finer details. So I cleared a wall and I just went with post-its. Thus far it is working out.
It might sound like I’ve got it all figured out and been using this for a good time now but actually this is all pretty recent, so it might just fail, but thus far it’s my best method for a complicated storyline story.