OT: Just decided a new reading rule for myself: when a popup interrupts my reading I'll ask myself "Does finding out what this says based on what little I know so far matter to me?" If the answer is not a resounding "yes!", I close the tab.
I often enter in something along the lines of "ffsgivememorethan5secondsbeforeaskingmetosignup@notcoming.back" with the hope that a human reads the email logs at some point.
If you use uBlock Origin, I highly recommend enabling one of the "Annoyances" filter lists (EasyList, AdGuard, and uBlock each have one. I use EasyList.)
Besides mailing list signups, chat widgets, etc. it also blocks GDPR cookie notices.
I'm curious to know if authors of great books know the "ending" ahead of time? In Stephen King's case, I'd say "no". In John Irving's case, where the ending is often "put the book down in awe", I'd assume he MUST, right?
I'd love to write a book, I have ideas, I just don't know if I'll ever have a good ending.
There are a number of descriptors that all tend to mean the same thing for the spectrum of writing styles at play here:
- Discovery / Outline
- Pantser / Plotter
- Gardner / Architect
Those labels apply to the extremes of either technique, and writers often fall somewhere more to one side or the other. Stephen King is a discovery writer. It's why his endings often fizzle. Brandon Sanderson is an outliner, which is why his novels tend to have a recognizable escalation to what fans have taken to calling "the Sanderlanche."
There's no right way to do it, and it really depends on what works for the writer.
What I find interesting about that spectrum is that it's also suggested by the tension between character and plot. It's extremely difficult to make both equally important. It's much easier to either sketch out the character motivations and then see what kind of plot happens to them, or, to sketch out the plot and then see what kind of characters that would suggest. But to do both at once is a real challenge.
It's also similar to songwriting in that sense. If you want to write a really good song, do you write lyrics first or music first? Generally speaking, if you pick one or the other, you'll find that one "serves" the other. Writing both at once, though... that's really hard.
From my experience, you don’t need to know the exact ending but you should have a general idea of where stuff needs to go.
Knowing the end state makes planning the events and character development easier, and can help you avoid pacing problems. You can create the structure working backwards from the end state.
When I write I usually think about what needs to happen to get everything to where it “needs to be” in a comprehensible way.
> makes planning the events and character development easier
My impression is that it makes the former easier and the latter harder.
Having a planned-out plot-focused story can lead you to a very tight, satisfying climax. But it can often make the characters feel wooden or like they are acting out of character in order to do what the plot needs them to do.
When a writer focuses more on the fidelity of a character's inner psychology, they can write more believable, interesting characters. But they sometimes get stuck in the position of "The plot needs them to do X but their psychology makes it more likely they would do Y." Then the author has to decide whether they keep the plot on rails and sacrifice some character fidelity, or have the story meander more to keep the characters feeling rich and authentic.
At one end of that continuum, you have thrillers and action novels where characters are little more than a bullet list of personality archetypes, but a bunch of cool shit happens and the pacing is perfectly dialed in. At the other end, you have literary fiction where you feel like you're getting a window into the minds of actual people, but nothing really happens.
> At one end of that continuum, you have thrillers and action novels where characters are little more than a bullet list of personality archetypes, but a bunch of cool shit happens and the pacing is perfectly dialed in. At the other end, you have literary fiction where you feel like you're getting a window into the minds of actual people, but nothing really happens.
Part 1 of Dostoevsky's The Idiot is maybe the best example I know that works from both perspectives. It's full of interesting characters with different motives, and it escalates to a incredible firework involving all these characters and motives all acting at the same time.
The ending of The Great Gatsby is also like that. A big tragic thing happens, but not because of some evil dragon - it happens because the characters are what they are.
And then you have something like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, or On the Road, or Breakfast at Tiffany's. Where things happen because the characters are basically chaotic assholes, the kind of people to whom things happen and you want to read about these things.
> Part 1 of Dostoevsky's The Idiot is maybe the best example I know that works from both perspectives. It's full of interesting characters with different motives, and it escalates to a incredible firework involving all these characters and motives all acting at the same time.
Yeah, that's absolutely the goal for most writers, but boy is it hard to craft a set of character psychologies that both feel believable while also leading to a plot that feels inevitable and monumental.
Anything by Charles Bukowski, or the beatniks, whose names I can't recall at the moment.
Edit: ah, Jack Kerouac was at least one of them (although On the Road was already mentioned). Electric Kool Aid Acid Test is a wild ride, as well as pretty much anything by Hunter S. Thompson.
I used to go to a lot of author talks/readings, and was always fascinated by how different different writers' techniques are. Some know the ending when they start, some are surprised by what comes out, or even feel like it's not something they control. Some meticulously outline and refine, some start at the beginning and write to the end.
Presumably in the case of George R. R. Martin and a Song of Ice and Fire, one of the reasons for slow progress on the next novel in the series is that a reasonable ending was always known, but each character's arc has changed so much from what was originally planned, that reconciling the two is very difficult.
For older authors like Charles Dickens, who wrote and published many of their novels chapter by chapter in magazines, plans would presumably change based on audience response.
My grandfather wrote 75-80 books and I asked him that very question. He said it depended on the genre. His YA or thriller books, he did not plan the ending but discovered it along the way. For mystery books, he wrote the ending first and then worked backwards to get to the first chapter. For biographies, he said he'd better know the end or he didn't do his research properly.
I imagine writing a book where you know the ending (not just the final scene, but the whole complete solution to the plot) beforehand is so boring, it would make writing the damn thing impossible. I mean at that point it's pretty much a coloring book. You came up with the shapes, for sure, but still.
I mostly share this experience, but for me it's a little bit more complicated.
I've tried to completely pants a story, and I've also tried planning stories out ahead of time in extremely rigorous detail, and I've ended up deciding to stay sort of in the middle. I generally have a pretty detailed idea of where I want a story to start and end, even down to some sense of how to get there, usually composed of some of the big events or set pieces or that happen in between, so I'm not pure pantsing, but then I just sort of find out as I go along how I get between each point, and really revel that process of finding out.
I think I've ended up writing things this way precisely because on the one hand writing a story based on a complete outline is extremely boring, it essentially becomes work, it just isn't Fun anymore, but on the other hand, I am an extremely set piece motivated writer — I am motivated to write things by specific scenes that I want to have happen or even specific vivid images — and so those scenes, spaced throughout my narrative, sort of act as the carrot on the end of the stick to get me to keep going to find out how I get there. If I go into writing a story without a sufficient string of high points and an ending, I'll tend to just sort of vaguely peter out after the last cool idea I did have in mind when I started and then lose interest eventually.
"People have commented – sometimes with irritation, sometimes nicely – on the amount of foreshadow that there is in my novel. Well, yeah, it’s not that hard to foreshadow what’s coming when you know what’s coming…I write endings first. I write last sentences – sometimes last paragraphs – first. I know where I am going. I write collision course stories."
I've just re-read Foundation original trilogy to wash the bad taste that the first (and for me last) season of the TV series left on my mouth. I was surprised to find so much foreshadow in the second and third books for the key twists in the plot.
By the way, Asimov is mentioned in TFA, that makes sense. With our Corín Tellado, he was one of the most prolific authors ever.
Do you know the “ending” of a piece of software before you write it?
Obviously it varies a lot, based on the type of project and your own personal methodology. Sometimes you might be able to say yes, sometimes you might have to say no. In some cases the question won’t even make sense. And in all cases you might suspect that the person asking the question is misunderstanding something fundamental about the working process.
Haha! I his case I don't think he has anything figured out. I think as he's writing it, he's discovering what the characters are doing and is in just as much shock as we are.
It really is a choice the writer makes. Stephen King is definitely a pantser...the starts off and knows not where the story goes. I am not sure, though, how much time he spends rewriting to fix plot holes, inconsistencies, blind alleys, etc. to produce a second draft.
Other writers can't write that way. They produce outlines so detailed that the actual writing is embellishment. Sometimes these writers are the opposite of writers like King...they start with the ending they want, and create a story that leads there.
A favorite anecdote, and I don't know anything, I could have misheard it, was about Tolkien.
Apparently, he did not know the character Saruman existed. He was just working the story, and had this gap which eventually turned into Saruman. Saruman seems rather "important", so it's interesting (to me) that it was not a core character from early on.
As a non-writer, even as a programmer, I find it kind of surprising that the authors surprise themselves. Writing code, it's rare that I've found "I needed Something" without knowing what it was, and then stumbled on to a solution. I usually have a pretty good idea of a mechanic I need for a particular situation.
I mean, I understand how a writer can create a character, and "let them go" and "see what happens", but I just think that's different from a more structural component of the story.
Of course, as a corollary, there was an author talking about how in one story, he managed to back the characters into a corner. He then proceeded to write some other parts of the story, and when he got back to the earlier characters, they were out. They had escaped. Whatever corner they were backed into, they were no longer there.
And he did not write how that happened. They just "got out". He used the interim story to, essentially, distract the readers about what was happening before.
It can be even more surprising when a character, planned from the beginning, suddenly leaps up and demands attention. Many years ago, near the beginning of writing one my several unpublished novels, I created a minor character essentially started demanding her due...she had a place in the story I hadn't anticipated. Eventually she became the protagonist of the prequel.
Patrick Jane's archenemy, Red John, needed an identity. It wasn't planned beforehand, so they chose one of the insignificant characters from the first chapters.
Several of the author’s steps involve doubling the amount of writing of the previous step.
At the logical extreme, you could double at every step, and achieve a better structured story with exactly twice the writing required for the final step.
(Because 1 + 2 + 4 + 8 + … + 2^n = 2^(n+1)-1)
And this makes sense with the fractal idea of the snowflake.
> Also, will this not just end up with a story that is without a clear red thread, seems like quite a disjointed way of writing.
On the contrary, that's what this method is all about. You start with one clear through line, and you iterate multiple times, filling in more detail with each iteration. But, the through line remains.
Drawing the snowflake is the same. The initial attempt is low in detail, and you iterate on it, adding detail each time.
You'll have to page through these, and an ad blocker is strongly recommended as that LiveJournal site is ad-fested (it didn't used to be that way... he wrote it in 2004 when it used to be friendlier).
This is actually a very useful way to build a story, one I've used myself. Given the kernel of an idea, it makes it relatively easy to develop a complete story you add more detail to the initial idea.
Thank you, I find it interesting to read the "back cover" now that I know about his writing method: one can see how it emerges from the various steps he described.
Also, it manages to make me want more, even though the premise is as corny as can be. If I ever write a novel, I will definitely have a closer look at this method.
This is a lot of words about how to write from someone whose entire output is a half dozen Christian novels that you've never heard of if you're not part of the godfic scene.
TLDR: It's simple a metaphor for analytical breakdown of a big problem into many little problems (vice what I thought would be a more interesting discussion about using fractal patterns to guide timing and direction of key decision points in a plot).
