Actually, have you ever read On Writing by Stephen King? It's a great resource; it's basically a combination autobiography and a how-to guide for writing and publishing. He uses a lot of stories to show what to do (and more often, what not to do) regarding this, and one that stuck out in my mind was when he was talking about writing Misery.
Basically, he had two absolutes in his mind when he wrote it. One was the basic premise, and the other was how it ended. He struggled with writing the story until he realized that he had to change the ending, because the way the characters developed and the story unfolded, it wouldn't make sense to do it the original way.
Ever since then, what I've mostly done was write chronologically; if I've got an idea about where I want the story to go, which is usually (if not always) the case, I still leave it vague enough that I can fiddle around with it as I'm writing, in case something happens that requires me to change it.
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Date: 2010-03-24 07:15 pm (UTC)Actually, have you ever read On Writing by Stephen King? It's a great resource; it's basically a combination autobiography and a how-to guide for writing and publishing. He uses a lot of stories to show what to do (and more often, what not to do) regarding this, and one that stuck out in my mind was when he was talking about writing Misery.
Basically, he had two absolutes in his mind when he wrote it. One was the basic premise, and the other was how it ended. He struggled with writing the story until he realized that he had to change the ending, because the way the characters developed and the story unfolded, it wouldn't make sense to do it the original way.
Ever since then, what I've mostly done was write chronologically; if I've got an idea about where I want the story to go, which is usually (if not always) the case, I still leave it vague enough that I can fiddle around with it as I'm writing, in case something happens that requires me to change it.