forum Just a quick question: Is it okay to pre-write?

Started April 21, 2018 by Deleted user

tune

I want to pre-write some important scenes like death scenes, epilogues, and prologues.
Would this be an okay choice? Are there any reasons that this would cause issues for future writing?

That's perfectly fine, so long as you know the timeline and don't end up confusing yourself. Then you should be great with pre-writing your scenes.

Depends on you. Are you more comfortable pre-writing? Personally, I love to pre-write large overarching themes/plots, but for the nitty-gritty scenes I'll daydream about them until I like them.

I think it's great, I do it all the time.

Thanks! I was just checking.

I love to pre-write, but the downside with them is making your story conform to them, and vice versa. The best advice is try not to be too rigid in your ideas for a pre-written scene, otherwise you might end up frustrating yourself if the scene doesn't perfectly fit inside your story. Treat it not like a jigsaw puzzle, but more like a lump of clay that you're gonna add to a sculpture. In that vein, I think it's best to very quickly incorporate your pre-written scenes into your story, because if you wait too long like I sometimes do, your ideas will completely change.

Pre-writing holds all sorts of caveats, especially if you're the sort of person who plans very little and allows their whims to take charge; but it's also super useful. My suggestion is along the lines of a couple of others here; write it if you will, but keep it open-ended just in case things flow poorly. The most distracting thing in a story is sudden position/action/mood changes of character that end up fitting in very poorly, chronologically.

I always prewrite because I have a hard time remembering ideas and stuff sometimes.