Absolutely! I heard it called a "puzzler" and that word appealed to me. (Couldn't quilt if my life depended on it! But I do puzzles all the time.) Get the corner pieces, then do the parts you know, and little by little, it all comes together. 🙂

But just a thought: While I'm a scene writer, I'm not the least bit ADD. So why do I write that way? Well, like you, I get stuck, but I'm very strong on Myers-Briggs Intuitive and Input/Learner with the Strengths System—all of which means I'm constantly mulling over stuff in my head, meaning sometimes I see a future scene better than the one in front of me. Instead of sharing at the blinking cursor, why not jump ahead?

Also, I'd love to mention that the timeline on One Stop for Writers (resource from Ackerman/Puglisi who've written here in WITS!) has been crucial to help me sort out all my scenes. It's super easy to plan out scenes and move them around. That helps me stay on track!

This is a really great comment for me to read! John talked about the Scrivener/Plottr connection above and now, after reading your comment, I REALLY want to try it!

Most excellent, Bridgitte! I'm glad to give you a name for it. And I'm happy to hear it's not just me. 🙂

Also, p.s...thanks so much for the sweet tweet of the post!

I stitch it all together eventually. Thanks.

I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I had to go back and change something in a prior scene for PURGATORY.

But it is forced on me by the inability to think well (that ol' brain damage).

What it feels like, when writing, is that any exploration of the landscape around a scene depends on the history from all previous scenes having been declared canon: so I can depend on them, my brain has now decided that is how those scenes actually happened.

Unless forced, I return only to read what happened, so I can continue to write forward. If I have the sense to record the little details in the character's bio, or an appropriate file, I don't even have to go back to the scenes themselves.

I HAVE to do it in order, because I cannot carry uncertainty forward. You're praising something I've no choice about.

And if I COULDN'T do it, I would have abandoned the writing YEARS ago, so I'm glad it still works for me. Just pray it holds out until I finish; I do, every day.

I love everything about this comment, Alicia! I too like to write short and just focus on the scene because too much in my head spoils my joy in the writing. It becomes a chore trying to juggle all that, so I'm super focused on the scene i'm writing (and ONLY that scene).

I am terribly impressed with you that you can do it all in order!

My other go to is extreme plotting, which means I know almost everything about a scene before I start writing it - except exactly how it happens. For me, that means I can concentrate on living a scene as I write it, which is plenty of excitement. I don't get writer's block because I have a long list of heuristics I attend to before trying to write the scene, and by the time I know it that intimately, it usually almost starts assembling itself, and I can focus on the characters and the language and the techniques.

It keeps what I have to deal with to about the length of a short story - about what I can hold in my head at a time - and uses all the tricks I've learned in thirty years of writing which are a written, ordered 'process' list. When my brain isn't working (often), I can still do a lot of the steps, so when the brain is functional it can do the actual writing of the scene in my controlled environment. Not fast, but it works.

The only thing that matters about how we write is whether we like the results. I do.