Would you start writing with only some of a story plotted out?

[Gernot]

@SharkCat

I get the impression that some people see those storybeats as predictive and meaningful, but they feel arbitrary to my story.

I would guess that your storyform still needs some adoptions to the story you really want to tell. It’s always a surprise when I open the PSR the first time once I have completed a storyform. Usually when I get stuck working the details out it’s because my storyform needs still some changes.

@SharkCat

Would it be a good idea to just start writing from the beginning, where the story is stronger and clearer and hope that somehow it works out in the end?

You could start writing and see where it takes you. You will learn new thinks about your story which will help you to get closer to the storyform of your story. But I would not expect that your current storyform will be the last one. I personally don’t start writing the actually story but use whatever storyform I have to start writing synopsis after synopsis.

@SharkCat

seems to blend both, so I don’t feel that throughline very distinctly, and I’m not sure what the relationship is about other than it goes from friends to lovers and ends well.

How to keep the Throughlines seperate and make them also distinctive is for me also often the trickiest part. I posted my approach here:

Visualise the Storyform and Throughlines on a single page using a Mindmap

Sharing an approach on how to visualise all throughlines on 1 single page To build a new story from scratch I often struggle to keep the throughlines separate. It can be confusing what piece of the story idea belongs where. To make it more understandable what’s going in my story, I was experimenting a bit how I could visualise it. I made a breakdown the of the story, starting from the goal and using the argument to show all throughlines beneath and on one single page. For brainstorming and …