20.8 Scene Drafting Order

Scene drafting order refers to the sequence in which a novelist actually writes the individual scenes of a manuscript, as distinct from the order in which those scenes will ultimately appear to the reader. In most novels the two orders coincide: the writer drafts the opening scene first and proceeds forward through the narrative until reaching the ending. But drafting order is a genuinely separate variable from narrative order, and many writers deliberately diverge from strict chronological composition for reasons of momentum, difficulty management, structural clarity, or creative process.

Linear Drafting

Linear drafting is the practice of composing scenes in the same sequence the reader will encounter them, from the opening line to the closing line, without skipping ahead or returning to fill gaps until the draft is complete. This approach keeps the writer's understanding of pacing, foreshadowing, and cumulative characterization synchronized with the reader's experience, since the writer is always building on what has actually been written rather than on what is merely planned.

Linear drafting has the advantage of maintaining continuity of voice and emotional throughline, since each scene is composed with full knowledge of everything that has come immediately before it in the manuscript. Its principal disadvantage is that it forces the writer to draft every scene in the order it falls, including scenes for which the writer currently has low confidence, incomplete conception, or high emotional or technical resistance, which can stall the draft at a difficult juncture regardless of how much easier material lies further ahead.

Nonlinear Drafting

Nonlinear drafting refers to any composition sequence that departs from strict narrative order. Common variants include:

• Drafting scenes in order of the writer's confidence or clarity about them, writing the most fully-formed scenes first regardless of where they fall in the story, and filling in less certain material afterward.
• Drafting pivotal or high-interest scenes first, such as a climax, a major turning point, or a scene the writer has been anticipating, in order to establish a target that the surrounding material can be built toward.
• Drafting by narrative thread in a multi-POV or multi-strand novel, completing one character's full arc or one storyline in isolation before moving to the next, and interleaving the strands only at a later assembly stage.
• Drafting outward from a small number of anchor scenes that the writer is confident about, filling in the connective material between anchors once the anchors themselves are fixed.

Nonlinear drafting allows a writer to sustain momentum by always having a lower-resistance option available: when one scene resists progress, the writer can shift to a different scene rather than stalling entirely. It also allows structurally important scenes to be established early, giving the writer a fixed point of reference that later scenes can be calibrated against.

The principal cost of nonlinear drafting is the loss of continuous calibration. A scene written out of order is composed without full knowledge of how the immediately preceding material will ultimately read, since that material may not yet exist or may still be subject to change. This can produce inconsistencies in tone, pacing, characterization, or referenced detail that must be reconciled during a subsequent continuity pass, once all scenes have been drafted and arranged into their final order.

Considerations Affecting Choice of Order

Structural Complexity

Novels with a single point of view and a straightforward chronological plot lend themselves more readily to linear drafting, since there is little structural ambiguity to resolve before composing any given scene. Novels with multiple point-of-view characters, nonlemer timelines, framing devices, or interwoven subplots often benefit from drafting order strategies that isolate one strand or thread at a time, since attempting to draft such structures strictly in final reading order requires the writer to hold multiple simultaneous timelines in mind at every point in the process.

Degree of Advance Planning

Writers who outline extensively before drafting have already resolved many of the structural questions that would otherwise create resistance at any given point in the manuscript, which makes linear drafting more feasible for them. Writers who discover the story primarily through the act of drafting are more likely to encounter points of genuine uncertainty mid-draft, and are correspondingly more likely to benefit from the flexibility of drafting out of order when such uncertainty arises.

Dependency Between Scenes

Some scenes depend on the specific content of earlier scenes, referencing details, objects, or emotional beats that must already exist to be referenced accurately. Scenes with heavy forward dependency are difficult to draft before their prerequisites are written. Scenes with minimal dependency, such as self-contained set pieces or standalone character studies, can be drafted independently of the surrounding material with less risk of contradiction.

Assembly and Continuity Work

Any nonlinear drafting order requires a subsequent assembly phase in which the scenes are arranged into their final sequence and checked for continuity: consistent chronology, consistent characterization, consistent handling of information the reader has or has not yet received, and consistent tone across the join between scenes drafted at different times. The more nonlinear the drafting order, the more substantial this assembly and continuity work tends to be, since more of the narrative's internal consistency was never verified during the drafting process itself and must instead be verified afterward.

Relationship to Revision

The choice of drafting order affects the character of the revision that follows. A linearly drafted manuscript tends to require less large-scale continuity repair but may carry forward the accumulated effects of resistance or fatigue encountered at difficult points in the sequence, since the writer had no alternative but to push through those points in place. A nonlinearly drafted manuscript tends to arrive at the revision stage with individual scenes that are more consistently strong, since each was written under conditions of relatively high clarity or confidence, but requires deliberate reconciliation work to unify those scenes into a single coherent progression.