Jayne on Reading the Ending First

Later this week Fallon Jones will close the case that he has been working on there in Scargill Cove. As you know, he is chronicling events in a private case file on Twitter (http://twitter.com/ArcaneSociety No you don't have to register with Twitter to read the story).

This project has been intriguing for me as a writer on a number of levels. I wrote it the way I write all of my books, meaning I had no clear idea of where I was going when I started the story. Sadly, I don't know any other way to write.

I did the writing in chunks over a period of a couple of months. The process was simple: I'd get an idea for a cliff-hanger, write a bunch of tweets that took me to the plot twist and then stop. A couple of weeks later when I realized that I needed more tweets, I'd sit down and write enough to get me to the next cliff-hanger.

This approach works very well for me when it comes to my full-length novels because I know that I will always be able to go back to the beginning and make any changes I need to bring the completed story into focus. Frequently I get my best ideas toward the end of a book and then have to do a lot of heavy rewriting in order to insert them into the first part of the story.

But with Twitter there's no going back. Each time I sat down to write the next part of the story I had to write my way out of whatever corner I had managed to write my way into on the previous occasion. Somewhere along the line it dawned on me that this is as close as I will ever get to writing the kind of serialized novel that was so enormously popular in the 19th century. It was a blast.

It has also occurred to me that anyone who happens upon this story this week or next will, due to the nature of Twitter, read the ending first. The latest tweets are always at the top. You have to scroll down to the very first tweet and work your way up if you want to read the story as it was written.

Personally, I do not have a problem with this. I always read the ending of a book first.

Which leads me to the obvious question. Do you read the ending first?

Sincerely,

Jayne