This is K.M. Wyland and you are listening to the 639th episode of the Helping Writers Become Authors Podcast.

I hope you enjoyed this week's episode.

Where should you start plotting your story? Why at the beginning of course except when it comes to fiction it's

not always that simple is it? One of the key

principles of story theory is the ending is in the beginning. What this means is that

any consideration of how best to begin a story must always include considerations of how best to end it, not to mention all the stuff in between that gets you to the ending.

So where should you start plotting your story is a legitimately thoughtful question for any

writer to ask, as did Max from Australia who asked me.

I went back to redraft an earlier redraft of a novel and

started at the end. I am working backwards to the middle section, which I was never quite happy with,

and see how I could have done a better structural job. So maybe one day you could post about where to start the story, back end, middle, or front end.

Now, first off, let me just distinguish that what we're discussing here today is not

so much the question of whether you should write your story chronologically, but rather whether you should plot your story chronologically.

Now of course for writers who prefer to discover plot as they write, this distinction won't matter.

But for the rest of us it can often be helpful to realize that

while we may be at our best writing the scenes of the first draft in chronological order,

we can, and probably should, consider our plot from a perspective that lets us jump outside the story's

chronological time and space so we can gain a big picture view.

Some writers prefer to outline these stories plot before writing the first draft.

Others prefer to analyze the plot after winging the whole thing in a rough draft.

Either way, every writer must eventually step back and examine the plot from a bird's eye view.

When we do this, what are we looking for?

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