Into the Unknown

There are a lot of jobs in the world, but for the majority of them, you know what you’re in for. You’re making something, or moving it around, or keeping track of it, or trading it. Even upper-level managers have a pretty fair idea what their job is. Writers, on the other hand, are always moving into the unknown.

I think this is why so many people are so devoted to various forms of pre-writing: they’re trying to make the trip knowable, or at least predictable.

It would be lovely if any of the techniques worked reliably. Not just because it would make the journey a lot easier and less stressful, though that would certainly be nice. Not even because it would make things move faster and more reliably, though that would be even nicer. But because, if you really could make a clear plan for moving into unknown territory, it would be a lot easier to a) sell the story to an editor and b) explain what I do to all the people with regular jobs that I meet every day.

I was thinking about this the last few days, in particular, because during my drive to Chicago last weekend, someone on the radio made the comment that you can’t play golf if you don’t know where the hole is. He was using it as a metaphor for setting goals, and it’s a good metaphor for that. It just doesn’t apply as strictly to writing as it does to other things, even though to some folks it looks as if it ought to.

Let’s start with something easy: My goal is to write a short story. Three to five thousand words, science fiction. That’s nice and clear, and doesn’t even get too specific about characters or plot. Yet I have, several times, sat down to write a short story and ended up with an 80,000 word novel. (The Harp of Imach Thyssel was the first time it happened.) I am not alone in this, either; I have a number of writer friends who routinely end up with novels instead of the shorter fiction they’d intended to write.

As soon as you throw in characters and plot and backstory, it gets even harder to end up where you think you were going. Oh, it may look good on paper, before anything actually gets written, but things nearly always start to drift the farther into the story one gets. Because one doesn’t actually know that the route one has charted through the vast empty unknown part of the map will get anywhere, let alone getting to the exact place it’s supposed to go. Add in process differences – there are folks who really need to know where they’re going, and others for whom having even an inkling of what the destination is like kills all desire to make the trip – and “know where the hole is before you try to play” starts looking positively problematic.

It’s a bit of a conundrum, really. On the one hand, explorers need to be prepared – it is much better to bring sunscreen and bug spray and an elephant gun and antivenin and extra rations, and not need them, than it is to need one of them desperately and not have it. (Especially the elephant gun and the antivenin.) On the other hand, explorers who are too sure that they know what to expect are prone to receiving nasty, sometimes fatal, surprises. Planning is often useful, but as the saying goes, no battle plan survives contact with the enemy, and other sorts of plans are just as fragile.

There isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer. There isn’t even a this-mostly-works recommendation that one can point a beginning writer at. About all one can do is try different things and see whether they’re helpful or not.

This is especially frustrating because the plots and structures and characters and above all process that’s hiding out there in the unknown keeps changing, so what worked for the last book, or the last three or five or seven books, will suddenly not work at all on the current one. The careful planner will find that the only way to get words down is to fly by the seat of her pants; the careless pantser discovers that the latest book requires reams of charts and maps and planning before he can get started. Or it may be less extreme: the writer who has never bothered with character sketches will find them a necessity; the other one who’s always used detailed maps has characters head straight for the blank area; the one who normally writes every morning before breakfast can’t put a word on paper til after lunch.

If you are going to move out into the unknown, you want to be as prepared as possible, but still hang loose so you can be flexible when that totally unexpected thing happens and everything changes (whether the unexpected thing happens to your characters, or to you). You may wind up at a different destination, or you may get where you intended to go, but by a different route. The trip may be completely different from what you expected, or it may have only one or two surprises (there will always be some), but as long as you don’t get too hung up on getting every detail nailed down in advance and then sticking to it, it’s bound to be an interesting journey.