I’ve always thought of myself as a primarily linear writer. I start writing on page one, and I keep writing until I reach the end. I rarely, if ever, skip around while writing a draft. I’ve occasionally written a dramatic scene from the center of a book before writing the material around it (The first tower scene in Dwarves of Whiskey Island comes to mind) but those have been the exceptions. At least, that’s the way I looked at it. . .
The current WIP has shown me that, in a sense, my linear writing model is something of an illusion. I’ve been switching POV like Sybil on crack, indulging in flashbacks, and otherwise jumping across vast stretches of space and time. Halfway through, I’ve discovered that just reordering the order of the chapters makes the whole thing flow in a much more natural manner. Really, I wasn’t writing linearly, my draft was jumping back and forth at will, and I was subconsciously indulging in a lot of narrative tricks to pretend that things were in the order I wrote them.
Now that I think of it, I’ve never gone through a rewrite where I didn’t end up re-ordering some of the scenes. Maybe I’m not so linear.
