Does anybody else find themselves writing the ending of a story before finishing the middle?

[Areala-chan]

I usually write the beginning and the end first, then bullet point out scenes to lead from one to the other. Quite often it all changes as I write, I'm very much a pantser and it all just builds up n my head as I move along. I don't often make many notes either. I just sit down and start writing and it comes....

I've always felt you and I were similar in how we approach our stories.

I don't outline, but I always have the main story beats that I want to hit in my head, and I will write them down on post-it notes or in a text file while I'm brainstorming just so I don't forget. Once I start writing those beats though, they develop organically along with the characters and their reactions to them, and I'm apt to rearrange the order of their appearance until I feel I've got the flow right.

I almost always know what I want the story's outcome to be (especially if I have a twist or surprise in mind) before I begin writing. But the words of the ending are almost always composed after I've hit every story beat so I can tie everything together, close the loop, and snip any dangling threads.

 

[theMasterBaiter]

I usually have an outline, then I go back to fill in the details. But a few times, the story has just come flowing out, fully formed in one shot. It doesn't seem to correlate with ratings or even my own personal satisfaction, but the outline ones seem much less likely to get finished. I think I have 10 stories, including a book, sitting there in Google docs taunting me. I think it's current me giving the finger to past me for "demanding" that I take the story in the outlined direction. LOL. But then I've also tried just allowing myself to change the outline and that hasn't helped

 

[WCSGarland]

I usually have an outline, then I go back to fill in the details. But a few times, the story has just come flowing out, fully formed in one shot. It doesn't seem to correlate with ratings or even my own personal satisfaction, but the outline ones seem much less likely to get finished. I think I have 10 stories, including a book, sitting there in Google docs taunting me. I think it's current me giving the finger to past me for "demanding" that I take the story in the outlined direction. LOL. But then I've also tried just allowing myself to change the outline and that hasn't helped

So far, I've found that I can only work on one story at a time. Hopefully you can get your plotter self and your pantser self to reconcile and finish all those stories.

 

[WhiteTailDarkTip]

I usually have an outline, then I go back to fill in the details. But a few times, the story has just come flowing out, fully formed in one shot. It doesn't seem to correlate with ratings or even my own personal satisfaction, but the outline ones seem much less likely to get finished. I think I have 10 stories, including a book, sitting there in Google docs taunting me. I think it's current me giving the finger to past me for "demanding" that I take the story in the outlined direction. LOL. But then I've also tried just allowing myself to change the outline and that hasn't helped

This. Exactly this. My story ‘Mrs Adams’ fell out of my head over a period of four days. There was virtually no rewriting. It’s not really my milieu either. It’s one of my most popular too.
I have several tens of thousands of words lingering in the wings, waiting to become a fully fledged story

 

[Britva415]

The responses remind me of that time I saw back-to-back replays of Inside The Actors Studio. One was Dennis Hopper and the next was Christopher Walken.

They were both asked to describe their process of reading a script and anticipating how they would perform it. And they couldn’t have been further apart in their approach.

Hopper really got into it, and would in fact read the whole script out loud, including other characters’ lines, and really wring out all the different interpretations and performance options he could find in the script. He wanted to be prepared for anything the director might think up.

Walken said, “The first thing I do is take a heavy black magic marker and strike out all the lines that aren’t mine.” And he’d just wait for direction after memorizing the lines.