Write Out of Order Without Losing the Whole

In 1967 The Paris Review asked Vladimir Nabokov whether he worked to a preplanned chart and whether he moved from the beginning through to the end. The pattern of the thing, he answered, precedes the thing. He fills in the gaps of the crossword at any spot he happens to choose, and writes these bits on index cards until the novel is done.

A crossword can be filled in at any square only because the grid exists, so every answer is constrained by the others. Drafting out of order can protect energy, since you write the scene you can see and leave the transition you cannot, but an out-of-order draft without a grid is a heap of pieces that each assumed something about the others. It leaves orphans at the seams. A scene refers to a letter that has not yet been written. A collaborator writes section nine against a version of section four that has changed.

Each orphan is a broken dependency. Some dependencies are facts, such as a date, an age, or a distance that a trip requires. Some are information the reader must have before a scene can mean what it means, and a setup in chapter two creates an obligation in chapter nine. In an out-of-order draft they are all present at once and have to be held somewhere: in memory, which gets harder with every unit added, on index cards like Nabokov’s, or in any tool that lets you link notes.

Linear drafting is a perfectly good answer to the same problem. Zadie Smith, whose method Practice 23 describes, writes from the first sentence to the last, so for her the dependency problem is solved by order itself, each unit written with the earlier units behind it. She gives up the freedom to follow energy across the manuscript.

Practice. Pick the ten unfinished units you expect to write next, or all of them if fewer than ten remain. For each, write two short lists: what this unit needs from elsewhere in the Work, and what elsewhere needs from it. Think of facts, information the reader must have, decisions you have not made, and promises. Draw arrows on paper, or note the numbers of the units; the map should take about half an hour. Write first the unit with the most arrows leaving it, the one other units wait on; units with arrows only inward can wait. Amend the map as you finish each of the ten, and if a unit has no arrows at all, ask whether it belongs.