Planning - Z to A
An inverted approach to planning long-form work.
There are several reasons why you may find planning difficult:
It doesn’t come naturally to you i.e. you have always been more of a ‘pantser’; that’s simply how you roll.
You find the mechanics of it too hard; you think you can plan (or you know you should plan) but you don’t really know how to go about it.
The process aspects of planning is not the issue; you simply find it difficult to look ahead.
Here we’ll look at planning mechanics and projecting forwards.
But before we do that, a home truth: time is the most precious and finite resource we have — and we’ve no idea how much of it will be at our disposal. Which makes this all the more significant:
a day lost…is a day lost
If you choose not to write one Monday then you won’t get that opportunity back. Ever. This is not to say that you must write every day, far from it; rather it is a plea to recognise that there is a ‘cost’ of not doing so, or a balance to be struck with how you spend you time. Writing aside, being content and happy is probably the primary goal to which we should all aim, and this may or may not involve writing on that particular Monday.
My only aim here is to emphasise how important our time is — and from that to extrapolate that ‘spending’ it wisely is important. One way to ensure we get the most from that precious commodity is to know — as best as we possibly can — the shape and destination of what we are working on i.e. to have a plan.
“you can’t spend time twice”
A plan can revolve around how we spend our time and when we write, as well as the route we need to take to get from A to Z on our work-in-progress.
We’ve already touched on the former in the chapter concerning how you identify what type of writer you are i.e. being structured in trying to be clear on when you are going to write and how much you are going to try and write (hours or words etc.).
Here I am going to focus on the planning as it relates to what you are writing, and will touch on both the mechanics of planning, and mapping out how you might envision getting to the end of a project.
The mechanics of planning
If a plan describes how an end goal is achieved — such as arriving at a destination or building something — it is essentially not much more than a visual representation of the steps between where you are (‘A’) and where you want to get to (‘Z’). These plans can be entirely graphical — for example, the instructions for putting together a piece of Ikea furniture — or highly technical — such as a Gantt chart for a complex infrastructure project.
From a writing perspective, in most cases our plans will take the form of a list of some kind. Indeed, that may be the easiest way to think about them. Often, when people go shopping, they write out their shopping list on the basis of the store’s configuration: the fruit and vegetables are nearest the entrance so they go at the top of the list; the wines and spirits at the far end of the store, so they go at the bottom. The objective is to put together an efficient list i.e. so that you don’t keep doubling back on yourself as you shop and you don’t miss anything.
Putting together a plan for a writing project — be it the compilation of a collection of poems or the drafting of a play — is not really much different: you want your plan to be accurate, effective, and to miss nothing out. You know you need to produce a final draft, but you are not going to do that before the first edit is complete; you may need some back cover blurb, but you probably want to produce an outline of the whole cover first — layouts for front and back — to know what space is available. And so forth.
planning is little more than the application of rudimentary logic
So think of a plan as not much more than a list. How you manifest that list is probably the one thing many people find difficult.
It doesn’t need to be sophisticated. Just a list will be fine, if that’s how your mind works; and scribbled on a piece of paper could be good enough. Thanks to computers, these days we are spoiled for choice in terms of tools available to us: word processing software, spreadsheets, ‘mind-maps’, specialist planning tools, and so forth.
There is no ‘best’ way. As with so much in our writing process, whatever works for you is the way to go. And again, trial and error will be required to land on what that might be. In my own case I will use a spreadsheet for complex planning, such as the plot and timelines of a novel; yet for other things — like this book! — I find a detailed breakdown in a word processing document perfectly adequate. I have tried ‘mind-maps’ in the past but they simply don’t work for me.
What you choose will also depend on how ‘tech-savvy’ you are. The advantage of using software is, of course, that your plans will be easy to modify and keep up-to-date.
Working out how you get from A to Z
In order to create a plan you need to know what the steps are i.e. the items on your shopping list. Some writers find this the more difficult aspect of planning. You know, logically, that your plan must break down the overall task into the steps between ‘A’ and ‘Z’; and you also know that ‘B’ should follow ‘A’, ‘C’ follow ‘B’, and so forth. This challenge is most typically relevant to the plotting of a long work of fiction, though not exclusively so.
The first difficulty can arise in trying to understand how many steps there are between ‘A’ and ‘Z’: 26? 15? 120? And secondary to identifying all these is having the confidence that you have them in the correct sequence i.e. one which allows your novel to flow and make sense to the reader. For example, mid-drafting you may realise that it should be ‘B-D-C’ and not ‘B-C-D’; how you manifest your plan should let you accommodate such changes.
However, one fundamental element in all of this which is often missed — and which consequently makes planning harder — is being absolutely clear that you know what ‘A’ and ‘Z’ represent.
At the macro level, part of ‘A’ will be your answers to the ‘why’ and ‘who’ questions; at the micro level it will be how you see the ‘what’: the first the pages of your story, the opening scene, its location, characters, action etc.
Once you have ‘A’, the next logical step would seem to be to identify what happens in ‘B’, then ‘C’ and so on. Part of the challenge with this approach is that, if unverified, you might find your narrative ‘wanders around’ lacking focus. And secondly — and more fundamentally — you may discover that you simply don’t know what comes next i.e. what on earth happens in ‘E’?! It can be more difficult than you might imagine to move yourself and your characters forward incrementally, chronologically, and coherently.
One reason for this could be that you have not yet defined what ‘Z’ looks like i.e. how will the story end? And when I say ‘story’, it could be a novel, a novella or short story, a play, non-fiction, or even a collection of poetry where there is a logical journey of some kind.
But let’s stick with long-form fiction for now. Do you know what happens in the end? Is the murderer revealed? Are the lovers reunited? Is the ‘big question’ answered? If you think about Booker’s seven plots, each of these will have a ‘typical’ ending e.g. the journey is completed (or not), the quest is successful (or not), and so forth. The importance in knowing what ‘Z’ looks like is that it gives you a bookend to your story; more importantly, you know where you are heading. Not only will this help prevent your narrative from ‘meandering’, it can also provide you with a good place to start planning — as illogical as that might sound.
For example. Your main character, Adele, is in both ‘A’ and ‘Z’, but the Adele at the end of the narrative will inevitably be different in some way: she will have learned things, done things, experienced things. Knowing Adele both ‘before’ and ‘after’ — a potential by-product of the character profile (see the next chapter) — allows you to ask yourself the question “what needs to happen to Adele between ‘A’ and ‘Z’ in order to make the ending effective and believable, and her whole journey coherent?” And the answer will be a list: she needs to meet Jim, she needs to shoot Bob, she needs to run away to Canada, and so on. Each of these elements in Adele’s journey from ‘A’ to ‘Z’ are essentially plot points in the story. You can go through the same exercise for Jim, Bob, and all your other characters. What you will end up with is a comprehensive list of all the things that must happen — not what you are guessing happens. And it will be a list of action points that are all heading in the same direction. There is no ‘meandering about’; you will have avoided “what shall I do with Jim now?” because you know what has to happen to him; and you are less likely to write something that is irrelevant in terms of the progression of the overall narrative.
Once you have your list of plot points, then planning is all about putting them in the correct sequence in which they need to appear, the journey from ‘A’ to ‘Z’. Nothing more, nothing less — just like that shopping list. Suddenly you have a plan!
This is only one approach of course, one little trick which might help you along the way.
sometimes starting at the end can be the best way to begin!
