Do You Know the Ending When You Start Writing?
In the above video (released by HarperCollins and found on The Daily Beast’s Book Beast section), successful mystery writers Linda Fairstein and Jane Stanton Hitchcock discuss, among other things, whether they know the ending of their story–whodunnit–when they begin.
Guess what? One does and one doesn’t.
So it goes with writing advice. What works for one writer doesn’t for another. Some outline, some don’t. Some revise as they go, some burn through the first draft then worry about cleaning up discrepancies.
I’ve been outlining a new novel and have started writing scenes. And true to all other attempts at outlining, this story has thrown me a curveball I can hardly fathom.
I’ve decided to run with it on a limited basis, feeling into the corners of this story to see if the gigantic change that’s come up is the “real story” or just a distraction.
Process control. My husband, an engineering type, swears by it. So, it seems, do writing gurus including Robert McKee. And I’m not eschewing the value; I’m trying to not even circumvent the process. McKee acknowledges that stories will throw you curve balls.
And while McKee suggests beginning the outline process anew when one of these curve balls arrives, unbidden, during the writing process, I’ve going to give myself a little more time with scenes that are surprising me before I return to outlining.
I will return to it, though, leary as I am of grinding to a dead end as I did with the first novel.
Still, I sometimes wish that I’d wake up one morning knowing exactly how to write this book.
Know what I mean?