Random Question on Submission Strategy (with poll if you want)

[CommandanteLemming]

So, I've realized that after next week, I run out of pre-written continuous material for "Millenial Reign". 

 

I have a ton of stuff written for later in the plot - ranging from near the beginning to near the end, but it's not in order.  I bounce around writing skeleton scenes and then try to connect the dots later. 

 

So, for your purposes here, do you prefer to read chronologically from beginning to end - in which case I slow down my submission until I figure out what happens in the "next chapter in order". Or do you want to see the unconnected later dots (of which I have plenty)? I'm probably about a chapter or two away from connecting my first big sequence into the continuous chronology, but it's still a valid question,

[Mandamon]

I think the key word here is "skeleton."  I'd be fine with a complete chapter or thought from later in the book, but I'd rather critique a well edited submission where I don't waste time telling you nitpicky things that you'll pick up on a later read through.  

It's also harder (for me) to get an idea of where the book is headed if the scenes are out of order.

[Robinski]

I agree with Mandamon.

 

I don't object to talking about long-term aims in the discussion, but I think it would be difficult to make useful comment on sections out of sequence, beyond commentary on grammar and style.

[jagabond]

Personally, I don't consider submitting anything until the work is finished. Mainly because I really hate when someone puts time and effort into reading my stuff, and their critique is something I could have caught by just letting it sit and going over it again. Waste of both of our time. I think submitting out of order chapters would have a similar effect, but again, that's just me.

 

I have not submitted a lot here (don't worry, some serials coming soon...) but posting WIPs, I feel, opens me up to too much feedback that muddies the story I want to tell. Like Stephen King says, write with the door closed, rewrite with it open.

[Silk]

I'd think this mostly depends on what the submitter wants to get out of critiques for the chapter in question.

 

If your primary aim is to get feedback on the events/structure/etc of a specific chapter or scene, and you're more interested in feedback about the particulars of the submission rather than the chapter's place in the overall story, then submitting chapters out-of-order is probably fine. (The skeleton you mentioned would probably still be helpful for giving people an idea of what happens in between, since that stuff's still important, with the caveat that readers may still miss stuff that they might have otherwise gotten if they'd read the "full" manuscript--foreshadowing etc.)

 

In a group like this, where it typically takes quite a while to push a full long-form manuscript through, it could also be useful to submit this way if you've got particular scenes you're particularly anxious to get feedback on, like if you want to see if a particular scene (or whatever) "works" in a certain way without committing to writing the buildup. (With the same caveat as above.) Or, I suppose, if you just want to keep feedback coming while you write the other chapters, so you can incorporate that feedback into your current chapters when it comes to stuff dealing with scene-by-scene, line-by-line, or whatever other issues you're interested in that can reasonably be critiqued within the frame of a single chapter.

 

However, if you're mostly interested in getting a sense of the story overall, submitting stuff out of order may not be the most useful approach for you, since even with a skeleton it WILL distort readers' sense of how the chapter works overall in the piece--more than a weekly submitting pace already does, anyhow (there's a certain level of artificiality in any writing group that just can't be avoided). Doing it this way will make it more difficult for readers to critique, and you to get useful feedback about, how the chapter works as a unit of a larger story.

 

tldr; depends on whether you're most interested in getting feedback on the chapters as individual units or the story overall.

[Endurant Archivist]

I'll agree with most of the above, specifically @jagabond, writing everything out with the story in mind, then rewrite with others input. I've tried both ways, there are pluses to both, but on the forum, I would suggest chronological order with well thought out scenes near completion.