: Re: How important is it to know the end before the writing the beginning? One of the Rules of writing indicates that knowing the end before the beginning is critical to writing. Which I find odd,

@Goswami879

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At the risk of redundancy, I'm answering to strengthen Lauren Ipsum's point because I think he/she's correct, but I sense some resistance. Like you I'm a struggling writer, but I've been a member of two writing groups; so I've watched many different writers (with different approaches) struggle. I have also seen that there are indeed two writer types (planners and explorers) who both suffer different advantages and disadvantages.

As a planner myself, I can see that explorers escape some of the stiffness that planners tend to suffer from. Explorer writing however, is a commitment to aggressive and fearless rewriting. By rewriting, I mean largely writing over. The first drafts of explorer writers must be considered prototypes - an alternate form of planning, not a short cut to writing. Thus these first drafts are throwaways.

When explorer writers get into trouble, it is because they attempt to salvage their first draft, most of which they wrote before they knew what they were going for. In screenwriting, they say that, "there are no 3rd act problems, only 1st act problems." This is because the first act sets up the entire story. If you don't know what your third act will be, it's darn near impossible to get the first act right, so you better be willing to completely rewrite your first and probably much of your second act.

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