From Janice Hardy’s Fiction University:
I’m about to suggest something that many folks will point to and say, “No! Bad advice, don’t listen to her!”
Write yourself into a corner.
I do this a lot, because I like to get my characters into as much trouble as possible without always knowing how they’ll get out of it. For me, this makes the story more unpredictable, because if I don’t know how they’re going to get out of it going in, how can the reader figure it out?
It keeps me very in the moment and close in the protagonist’s head. I get to decide what to do based on the information at hand (as opposed to knowing how it will unfold), and I’m not unconsciously (or consciously) nudging them toward the solution the entire time. I’ve found that when I know exactly how my protagonist is going to get out of trouble when I start a scene, I let my bad guys slack off and only do what’s needed to fit plot. The tension drops off because the bad guys aren’t really trying.
Link to the rest at Janice Hardy’s Fiction University
Did a ’round robin’ years ago with three other writers and never knowing where or what they’d leave you to carry on. Was fun.
And this is how many pantsers live, every day. I find it exhilirating, if scary.
Recently, I have watched a series the world(W),the story was so complex (story revolves around a sketch character in a webtoon and a real world girl that how webtoon will live in real world from getting out of his webtoon world) that a viewer almost have no idea that what could happen next, every episode was full of surprises, no one can imagine why those incidents happened, but every doubt is vividly explained by the writer. The story was so impressive, complex and full of suspense.
well, it is true that story should be like that the writer itself don’t know what to be next, this makes writing more
unique
When writing The Hidden Fortress (one of Lucas’s inspirations for Star Wars), every morning Akira Kurosawa created a no-win situation for his protagonists. Then his other three writers had to figure a way to get them out of it. Recalls Kurosawa, “This is how we wrote day by day. I wanted to make an invigorating historical spectacle.”
I remember reading about a pair of writers who did one of the longer Doctor Who serials back in the Sixties; one wrote the even episodes, the other wrote the odds. They took great relish in writing their cliffhangers, trying to leave little or no escape for the partner to come up with. Same principle, I suppose.
In 1985-86 DC Comics ran a 12 issue mini-series, DC CHALLENGE using that approach:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DC_Challenge
Each chapter was by a different team and ended on a cliffhammer. The author also provided the title for the next chapter. No communication allowed so each author had to start by working out a solution and then try to live up to the intentionally goofy title provided. The result was an amusingly silly romp through time and space of the DC mythology.
They are repeating the experiment this year but with the added constraint of a fixed setting and central character; a planet of the apes-style post-apocalyptic dystopia created by Jack Kirby. I haven’t sampled it but the setting guarantees a heavy dose of goofiness.