The Planning And The Plan

I just read this from one of the writers I follow, Melissa Foster. And felt a need to rebut it.

Yesterday ... I stood at my easel with a purple pen, and scribbled a sorta-kinda outline for my new manuscript. I was so proud of myself for having tried to prepare before writing (a huge feat for a pantser like me!). I then took a red pen and added the next layer to each point. Twenty minutes later I stood before my computer on my treadmill desk, music on, easel before me, and...I wrote 9200 words. None of which followed the sorta-kinda outline. What this taught me is that I am not you. You are not me. We all march to a different beat, and we need to do what works for us as individuals. So, please do not judge my inability to outline. My creativity flows wild and free, and I shall not judge your ability to prepare (which I am in awe of on a daily basis) and follow your own creative path.

Though I am more of a "plotter" than I am a "pantser," I understand that others work differently and my primary concern is pragmatic: Did doing what you did make successful completion of your writing task easier, or harder?

Clearly, if cannot produce an outline, you ought not produce an outline before you write your novel. If you wait, you'll never write! You should write instead. I just hope you don't get blocked 1/3rd of the way through your project.

In the paragraph above, Melissa cites the fact that she wrote 9200 words without consulting her outline as evidence that she cannot outline. Yet, she had already created an outline in purple and red. She proved capable of creating an outline, she just didn't bother following it.

And that's cool.

No, that's better than cool, that's awesome. She dashed off 9200 words of prose!

Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe in World War II, said this:

In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.

An outline is not a contract. It is not a covenant signed in blood. For the writer of fiction, the outline should be no more than a plan. It should capture your thinking about your work and what you intend to do. The outline should bring to mind the problems a work will have to solve. (I'm sending Mycroft Holmes to Kashmir? OK, maybe I should research a bit of Indian culture, or the topography of the region.) The outline should give the writer an idea of where the story is going. (Where am I going after Kashmir?) It helps you identify scaffolding.

An outline is just your thoughts written down. It's a deliverable of thinking. When you are planning a work you are thinking about it. And when you are planning a work, you don't know some vitally important facts. An accurate plan can only be made after the work is done and you've learned all you need to know. And that's why it's worthless, because everyone makes plans at the point of maximum ignorance.

As you get into the work you learn, and that learning needs to be integrated with your up-front thinking about the work. Yes, you could stop writing and update your outline, but you ought not turn off the writing part of your brain for busy work. Remember, the plan is useless. Don't stop for it. And planning is indispensable. Don't skip it.

HItting The Wall At 10,000 Feet

If you hit the wall at 10,000 feet, you're dead. When I did it at 6 inches, I was OK.

When you're at 10,000 feet, you're generally in an airplane going over 100 miles per hour. But when I hit the wall at 6 inches, I was a kid on a tricycle going a lot slower.

What has this to do with writing?

When you think about what you are writing, abstraction matters. If you think at a very abstract level, you can see entire planets at a glance, whereas at the least abstract level, you are amidst a forest of atoms. My point is more obvious in writing software than in writing novels: When you're debugging lines of code you need the atomic details. When you're laying out a system architecture, you need to be able to see the whole thing. You need to think more abstractly.

But I'm a writer, not a programmer!

Fair enough, but you cannot write without thinking. And this is about thinking about your writing.


But I'm a pantser, not an outliner!

Fair enough, but I'm pushing thinking, not outlining.

If you're writing by the seat of your pants, you are thinking about the sentence you are writing, and the next paragraph, and rest of the scene. This thinking is important for things like getting the grammar and spelling right. Or making a clear and interesting paragraph or scene. Maybe even setting up for the next scene. This kind of thinking is very similar to what a programmer does when he's in the code. It's vital, but this thinking is subject to tunnel vision. It's subject to missing the forest for the trees.

At some point you have to think about your work as a whole. A haiku or a vignette can generally be seen as a whole while you're writing. But longer works like novels cannot be seen as a whole without a higher level of abstraction.

You have to think about your work as a whole, because if you don't you won't know what to do if you hit the wall. Gentle reader, you may have never hit the wall. Good for you. I distinctly recall the time when I was about 60% done with my first novel. And I got stuck. I'd written myself into a corner and I could see no way out.

When that happened to me I consulted the notes that I had taken when I had thought through the novel as a whole before I ever started writing. These written notes showed me where I'd deviated from my originally intended story arc. They showed me where the story was going. Seeing this, and thinking at this higher level of abstraction, I could see how to modify my notes to get from where I had written to where I had to go.

In software development they talk about pseudocode, where you describe things at a higher level of abstraction so you can clarify your intent. In movies, they have storyboards, where the script is abstracted to a comic book representation. In your writing project, you need to think at a sufficiently high level of abstraction to take in the work as a whole. When you think at this level you'll see problems that you can solve at this level.

Those "notes" you mentioned; they were an outline weren't they!

Yes, they were. And if you're insistent upon not outlining, then don't. Make your notes in the way that's most effective for you.

Perhaps as a synopsis. You'll need a synopsis sooner or later, why not sooner? Or better, why not write a Product Description. Look at any book you might buy on Amazon. What you will see in every one of the 101,501 works available for purchase is a Product Description. That Product Description is what will move me to buy the work or move on. I don't think I'm alone in this.

The Amazon Product Description should be an accurate seen-as-a-whole representation of your writing project. You can examine it to decide whether it works or not. If you write it before you start your novel, you can show your friends or folks from your target market and ask whether they would buy it or not. As you write and you discover the work needs to go somewhere else, you can revise the Product Description. Later, when your work is finished and you shop around your work to some agent or editor, Or Better when you put it up on Amazon, it will be a polished gem.

If you have a Product Description that works, when you hit the wall, it won't be at 10,000 feet, because you've already thought things through at that level. If you've thought the work through in a more detailed, thorough manner, you will have solved more problems up front. If you're lucky, you'll find you hit the wall at 6 inches and you haven't even dented your trike.

 

Oh, and if you'd like to see a larger version of the penultimate image, you can find it here.