Writing a story when you don’t know what’s coming next can be intimidating, but it’s also one of the most satisfying (and necessary!) parts of writing.
Let’s discuss why, then practice writing without knowing what will happen next together!
During the last stream, a subscriber requested that we go over how to write a story despite not knowing what’s going to happen next.
How to Write a Story Not Knowing What Comes Next
- It doesn’t matter if you’re a compulsive outliner, or if you write by the seat of your pants: at some point you’re going to have to write a story where you don’t know what comes next
- And that’s a good/completely normal thing!
- It’s impossible to know everything that will happen in your story before you write it, no matter how detailed of an outline you’ve made in advance
- In fact, not knowing everything in advance is part of what will make your story good eventually
- Let’s go over why that is, how to work with the problem, and then practice writing a story ourselves where we don’t know what comes next!
Why Can’t We Know Everything in Advance?
- When outlining, you’re essentially creating a story map
- But a map doesn’t have everything on it: it’s missing a ton of details, like plants, the weather, people, animals, signs, etc.
- You can use the map to guide you, but it’s your job as a writer to fill in those details as you walk down the road
- For example, when I outlined Metl, originally I didn’t know how Caden and Annika would escape from the orphanage
- But when I was writing their escape, I realized they couldn’t outrun the Holy Police… so I gave Caden a horse, Deber!
- Adding Deber opened a whole lot more to the story: making Caden the stable boy, having Deber get hit by an arrow, etc.
- Another example is I knew I had to get Caden information about the long-ago past somehow, but in my outline I just wrote “he learns info from old wizened hermit here”
- But then as I was writing, I got the idea of a technology black market that was literally underground… The Basement!
- And then I figured having an intelligent computer give the info on the past to Caden would be fun, so I did exactly that
- For both those examples, I didn’t know what was going to happen in the story, but that didn’t stop me from writing it
- I used what I’d learned from writing the story up to that point to figure it out — I used the details I’d created along the way
How to Work With Not Knowing What Comes Next
- Not knowing what comes next when you write a story is as normal as not knowing the specific people you’ll meet along a journey that you’ve mapped out
- Who you’ll meet depends on what happens along your journey: if you get a flat tire, you’ll meet an auto technician; if you get hungry, you’ll meet a waitress at a cafe
- And what comes next in your story depends on the details that you create along the way too
- For example, you’re writing a romance, and you need to have your love interests meet, but you don’t know how it will happen
- As you write your story though, your characters will come to life, they’ll no longer be amorphous ideas
- Maybe you start your story with your main character as a doctor, a funny scene of her failing to take a child’s temperature, so she goes to get a lollipop only to discover they’re out, so she runs across the street to the candy store… and meets the hot guy who works there and gives her a giant lollipop for free
- Before you started writing, you had no idea she was a doctor, or that she was out of lollipops, but once you put the character on the page and the story comes alive, and actual things happen, the details you create will guide you to what comes next
- Quite often your story/characters will tell you what they want to have happen, so listen to them!
- But you do have to WRITE them first for that to happen
Let’s Practice!
After that, chat suggested a bunch of juicy premises for stories, voted on their favorites, and picked one for us to write without knowing what was going to come next.
Here’s what they chose: man stuck on island with cult leader and followers
Here’s what we wrote (without any planning in advance):
When the cruise ship I was on crashed into the deserted island, I thought my life couldn’t get any worse. But I was wrong.
Because then I met the Vasers.
“It is as the Great Basin ordained!” one of the weirdos said, holding his hands up to the scorching sky. “We asked to be delivered to a holy land, and he poured our destiny before us.”
It looked like there were about two dozen or so of them, all smiles as they walked around the blistering white sand. Me, I felt like crap in my salt-soaked clothes, desperately trying to get my phone to work to no avail. It turned on, but I had no signal.
“Hey,” came a voice from nearby. She didn’t look like one of the vase-crazies. Like me, she had her phone out too, and seaweed was wrapped around her ankles. “You have any luck with yours?”
“Nope,” I said, showing her my screen. She saw the red X through my signal symbol and sighed.
“Well, there’s gotta be a hundred or so of us here, someone needs to have a working phone, right?”
“Let’s just hope it’s not one of them,” I said, nodding toward the Vasers. “They’d just call a pottery store or something.”
She snorted a laugh. “Seriously. Who knew we had a cult on board? I thought it was weird when they brought their own vases to the breakfast buffet, but I didn’t ask any questions.”
She offered her hand to me. “I’m Emily.”
“Aaron,” I said, grabbing hold, happy to have met one sane person. “Hopefully we won’t even be here long enough to get to know them very well.”
One of the Vasers started yelling. I thought she was doing some weird prayer thing or whatever, but then she held up her phone.
“Curator!” she said, handing her phone to the guy who’d been talking nonsense before. “I have a signal. We can call for help!”
The woman had gained the attention of everyone on the beach. There were sighs of relief and grumbles of annoyance. Personally, I couldn’t believe I was actually looking forward to going back to my job as a legal claims adjuster, trimming down invoices and staring at a computer in a cubicle all day. I guess it’s at least better than burning and starving to death on an island. I guess.
“Thank you, Veronica,” the Curator or whatever his name was said, taking the phone from the woman. “You are indeed correct that we have a signal. A signal directly connected to the Great Basin itself. All others are mere… distractions!”
With the final word, he tossed the phone into the ocean.
Screams came from everyone except the Vasers. People ran up to the shoreline, some of them dived in, trying to find the phone. Of the three who went in, two came back covered from head to toe in jellyfish. They delicately peeled the tentacles off their bodies, ripping a layer of flesh and leaving behind blood-red streaks as they seethed through their teeth in pain.
The third one did not come back.
I’d watched the whole thing in shock, but then reality hit me. That idiot had thrown away one of our chances out of here!
The closest I’d ever come to conflict in my life was when I told a lawyer he couldn’t charge our office five hundred dollars an hour for his “cross-cross examination consultation fee.” On the phone with him I was meek, lame, and let him yell at me, but I stuck to my guns and saved the company a bunch of cash.
Now it was time to save myself.
I ran toward the Curator, ready to clock him in the face, but his minions stepped in front of me, congealing into a massive human shield. They effortlessly pushed me away, and I fell to the sand, soundly defeated.
“My cracked brethren,” the Curator announced to the island. “This fortuitous miracle has brought you into the well of the Great Basin. Saved you from your lives of evergrowing fractures, ignorant of his vessel. Let him pour forth upon your wounds and be healed, lest you shatter and spill all of your true contents.”
The other Vasers all nodded vehemently and started throwing their own phones into the water. They urged other people to do the same, but no one was listening to them. Everyone was either tending to the jellyfish wounds, running hysterically in tight circles and screaming, or staring off into space in disbelief.
Emily bent down next to me. “I guess we’re going to have to get to know them pretty well after all.”
* Day 3 *
It turned out that finding food on a desert island wasn’t nearly as easy as Gilligan’s Island made it out to be. There were no palm trees loaded with coconuts and bananas, or delicious desert-chickens just walking around asking to be roasted.
Trekking away from the beach, there was a jungle that stretched as far as we could see, but venturing in too far was suicide. Who knew what venomous bugs or frogs were in there, not to mention easily getting lost.
So we stuck to what we could easily find: hard, bitter gourds that grew out of the ground and tasted like stringy swamp. It wasn’t much, but it was something in our growling stomachs.
Far worse was the thirst. The gourds only had a little moisture in them, and there were no springs to be found anywhere near the edge of the jungle. So far the island seemed to be giving us just enough to sustain our suffering.
Except for the Vasers. Each of them had their own vase with them at all times, which they used to easily fill with ocean water and purify it with some sort of strange hole they dug in the sand. Something about putting vases inside of vases… I didn’t really follow. Or care. Until the thirst solidified into barbed wire in my throat.
I told Emily I was planning on asking them for water, and even though she hated the idea, it was slightly preferable to a long, dry death. Slightly. She wasn’t doing much better, and the two of us walked up to the Vasers together.
“Hey,” I said, nodding toward their pit of purified vase-water. “Do you mind sharing?”
The Curator came over and smiled at us, holding a vase full of sparkling fresh water. In that moment, I didn’t feel the clumps of sand in my hair, my three-day-old clothes caked to my body, the sunburns on every inch of my skin. I only felt an overwhelming desire to chug the entire vase.
“But of course,” the Curator said. “You may drink as much as you like from the holy vase. All that we ask in return is that you formally reject that distraction in your pocket.”
He was talking about my phone. It was off, saving battery, but I turned it on twice a day to check for a signal. Still no luck, but I was still clinging to the hope that maybe tomorrow it would work. And he wanted me to throw that hope into the ocean.
Looking around, it looked like a bunch of others had already given in. People I recognized who screamed in terror at seeing the original phone thrown away three days ago, were now smiling as they drank deeply from the vases. Pretty much the only ones who hadn’t given in were the ones who’d been stung by jellyfish, lying in the shade of the jungle and breathing heavily. They probably didn’t have much longer, so they had nothing to lose by giving in. I did.
I shook my head and stepped back. It was these weirdos’ fault that we were stuck here in the first place! I couldn’t let them take away our last hope of escape.
Plop. The sound of a phone hitting the ocean.
Emily brought back her throwing hand and snatched the vase from the Curator. She brought it up to her lips and chugged the whole thing down, letting out a satisfied ahh.
The Curator nodded in approval. “Outside distractions only muddle your contents. Open your mind and accept the wisdom of the ages filling your mind vase.”
Emily looked at me, shrugged, and joined the Vasers. I stuck my hands in my wet, sandy pockets, feeling my phone, and stomped back to the jungle to find some gourds.
* Day 7 *
So I threw my phone into the ocean.
I couldn’t take it anymore. I was licking vines for moisture, biting sticks, scooping up handfuls of dirt and bugs and being overjoyed every time a juicy one popped between my teeth, not even caring if it was blood or water or poison, just the joy of having some liquid going down my throat.
I think it was the two jellyfish victims finally dying that pushed me over the edge. Their cooked bodies, grilled and blistered and scarred red all over, I didn’t want to end up that way. I couldn’t end up that way. Who cares about the stupid phone? We’re going to be stuck here forever anyway!
Plop. The vase of water was the most delicious thing I’d ever tasted.
The Curator was proud of me, but I still wasn’t going to be one of his weirdo cultists. It didn’t seem like he was pushing it anyway. He had other plans.
“Today, our vase has grown by one, but it has also shrunk by two,” he announced to the island. Now everyone was gathered around him, no more loners. “From one vase to another, the waters of life flow between us. And now to transform the broken ones, so their contents may be forever preserved within the Great Basin.”
The Vasers dragged the corpses to the beach, laying them on top of a mound of dry leaves that they’d put together. The Curator stepped before them, holding something I couldn’t see in his hand.
“Burial is a false practice,” he said to everyone watching. “Wasting precious content, trapping the souls from reaching the Great Basin. Only through rejecting our imperfect flesh, our excessive holes, can the holy clay contain us when the Breakening comes.”
He knelt before one of the corpses, alongside two other Vasers. All of them opened their hands, revealing sewing kits.
Immediately they went to work, sewing shut the corpses’ eyes, then ears, then nostrils, then flipping them over and sewing shut… the other hole on the backside. I was too awed and shocked to even say anything; I could only stand there, watching the horrific process, until the only hole that remained on the dead bodies were their open mouths.
“The perfect vase,” the Curator said, and his Vasers repeated in unison. “One body to hold the content, one hole to pour forth blessings upon the world.”
Their bodies perfected, the Curator set the dry leaves ablaze with a lighter, finalizing the process. Slowly, their flesh turned to ash, and the ash was poured into a vase. Vases inside of vases.
Watching it, suddenly things started to make a lot more sense. My life up to that point had been a joke. I’d wasted away inside an office, straining my eyes on spreadsheets, for what? To make pretend-money for someone else.
What about me? What about my soul?
Vases inside of vases.
* Day 15 *
Vemily and I have been working hard for the Curator. At first he didn’t trust us, and put us on hunting and gathering duty. But we proved our loyalty, venturing further and further into the jungle, not scared of what we would find, for no matter where we were in this mortal realm, we were always inside the Great Basin.
When I returned with a fully-grown boar, defeated with the sharp shards of a broken vase, and I brought it to the Curator ready for roasting, that was when he finally baptized me.
I was Vaaron, Bearer of the Boar.
But that was only my beginning. The bottom of my well which would eventually spill forth from the brim. The Curator let me work on his most sacred project: the Mother Vase.
He and his vessels had been travelling for decades, looking for a sign from the Great Basin for where to begin to dig. To dig so deep far down they would turn the entire Earth into a vase itself.
This island was that sign, and we devoted our days to creating Mother Vase.
I dug faster, stronger, longer than anyone else. But that wasn’t enough. I was going to go one step further. For the Curator. For the Great Basin. For myself.
Vases inside of vases.
* Day 132 *
Mother Vase was here, and I was the first to be placed inside her. Not as mere content, but as a vase. A true vase.
When I told the Curator about my idea, he was hesitant, but eventually I convinced him. It had never been done before, but if there was ever a time, it was now.
I let him transform me into the first living, perfect vase. One body. One hole. All the other, unnecessary ones sewn up.
I could no longer see, hear, smell — but that didn’t matter anymore. Those senses had betrayed me for so long, tricking me into thinking I was alive while I was never even living. For the first time, I felt.
Vases do not have wants, they only have one need. The need to hold content. I was the first content for Mother Vase, and through me she would pour forth her blessings upon the world. From me to others, to others, to others…
Vases inside of vases inside of vases inside of vases.
When the cruise ship I was on crashed into the deserted island, I thought my life couldn’t get any worse. And I was right.
Thank the Great Basin that I met the Vasers.
Did that story feel like something we’d planned in advance? Because it wasn’t, we wrote the entire thing by the seat of our pants.
What we did do, however, was let the details that we’d written influence what we created next. Aaron/Emily’s conversation about their phone led to the phone throwing, which led to the jellyfish bites, which led to deaths, which led to sewing, which led to the ending.
And that’s just one thread! There’s also the vases being used to hold water that came up, as well as the dead-end job that Aaron had before, which influenced his decisions.
We had no idea where the story was going to go, so we let it tell us where it wanted to go.
If you want to join us and help write a story by trolling in chat, or share your own writing for feedback, then we’d love to have you join us on Twitch.
And you missed the stream, you can still watch them on the YouTube channel or watch the full stream reruns.
Hope to see you next time, friend!
Top images: Pakutaso