Plan Until You Can Move

One writer has a thirty-eight-page outline, color-coded scene cards, and not a sentence of prose in five months, because every day the outline turns up something else that is not yet resolved. Another has a hundred and forty pages of draft and cannot say why her protagonist keeps returning to the same kitchen. Each believes all the while that she is being faithful to a method. The first is using planning to put off the discomfort of drafting, the second using drafting to avoid the discomfort of deciding.

The threshold for planning is movement. Plan until you can start the next stretch of writing without a decision you are afraid to make, and then stop. A plan removes one particular kind of uncertainty, the kind that blocks, and the other kinds are best resolved by writing. So the rule concerns what the plan does for you, and its length is beside the point. For one writer the plan is a sentence. For another it is a diagram of causes, a list of the ten claims in the order a skeptic would demand them, or a timeline that keeps three narrators’ ages consistent.

The plan that got John McPhee off a picnic table was very small, which is worth noticing in a writer who plans heavily in other projects. At the end of the summer of 1966 he lay down on that table, behind his house in Princeton, and stayed there, on and off, for nearly two weeks. He had finished the research for a piece about the Pine Barrens of southern New Jersey, about eight months of interviews and reading, enough material, he says, to fill a silo, and he had no idea how to begin. He got up with one organizing principle and no full outline. A seventy-nine-year-old Pine Barrens native named Fred Brown had some connection to at least three-quarters of the topics, so McPhee could introduce Brown and wander the woods with him, each theme arriving as something touched upon it. That answered the one question that had pinned him down, where do I enter and what governs the order of what follows, and it left what each section would contain to be worked out in the writing. After about thirty thousand words, he reports, the rest could take care of itself; the principle had given him a sense of a nearly complete structure, enough to begin on and to keep going for a long stretch. He tells the story in “Structure,” published in The New Yorker in 2013.

The two kinds of uncertainty can feel alike. Not knowing what happens in chapter four may be a block, or it may be the engine of the book. Not knowing whether your second chapter’s evidence is strong enough blocks you if you cannot begin chapter three without the answer, and if you can, it is an ordinary open question. The test is whether you can sit down tomorrow and write one useful unit. If you can’t, find what is missing and plan exactly that.

Published methods put the threshold in very different places. Stephen King, in On Writing, says he distrusts plot partly because he believes plotting and the spontaneity of real creation aren’t compatible. He starts from a situation, often a what-if question, and follows it, so for him characters in a predicament are enough to move on. Other books put far more before the first scene. John Truby’s The Anatomy of Story is organized as twenty-two steps and Jessica Brody’s Save the Cat! Writes a Novel as fifteen beats, and using either as a plan means settling the shape of the whole story, start to finish, before you move. That seems to suit a writer who cannot begin without knowing where the story ends. For one who learns the ending by writing toward it, it seems a good deal to ask.

A plan can also be too thin, and then you can move fast in the wrong direction. Finding out late is expensive, particularly when material is costly to gather or other people depend on the structure. The authors of a co-written history cannot each discover the book separately, so for them the threshold is higher.

Practice. Write down, in about twenty minutes, the minimum map for the next five units: one sentence for each, stating what it must accomplish that the previous unit did not. Stop at five. If you can write the five without strain, you are probably ready to begin and should do so within the hour. If you can write only two, find the one decision that blocks the third and spend your effort on that. If you want to write eighteen, you are planning past the threshold; ask whether the extra sentences are removing a block or soothing anxiety. Then draft the first unit with the five sentences where you can see them.