Planning and Process

Graphic by Peg Ihinger

It has taken me a long, long time to really begin to understand how the story structures people describe—the various act structures, the hero’s journey, the pick-a-number “basic plots,” and so on—interact with the writing process for different writers. A large part of the problem is that they look so temptingly systematic, as if all you have to do is plug in some characters and fill in a few details and *poof*, you have a foolproof plot outline that will make it easy to crank out a novel in a few weeks.

As if.

Every last one of those story structures was invented by someone who was analyzing a bunch of successful, finished, edited, published novels. Ninety-plus percent of the story structures out there are presented to authors as a way of planning novels. Can anyone spot the problem here?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately because I ran smack into that issue while writing my current novel, and in spite of umpty years of experience, I didn’t expect to. And the reason I didn’t expect it is because this time, I had far more of everything worked out it advance. Not because I was trying anything new; because the story required it.

I’d been wanting to write a time-travel fix-it fantasy for a long time. The main thing that kept me from starting was the issue of how to set up the dismal future that would be the main character’s reason for going back in time to fix things. I did not want to write a book in which the entire first half was only there to give readers the miserable, hopeless future that the protagonist was supposed to fix, but without that information, the reader wouldn’t have the same understanding of the protagonist’s motivation.

I eventually came up with a solution, which required a viewpoint/protagonist who is not a time-traveler, and who therefore has to learn about the miserable future the same way the reader will have to. That required me to come up with a much more detailed outline of the original timeline than I normally do, a much more detailed understanding of the time-travelers’ personalities  than I usually know without writing them for several chapters first, and a long list of things both major and minor that the time-travelers could and would change, both deliberately and accidentally, as well as how those changes would propagate through the original events (AKA detailed plot outline).

The resulting spreadsheet is extensive, and includes everything from an unplanned meeting with someone the protagonist hadn’t even known was in town in the first timeline, to making an appointment with someone who could have major influence on the changes if they could be persuaded to do something different.

As a result of all this detail, the first three chapters went very smoothly. The next three diverged only slightly from my projected outline, as some characters showed up who were only semi-planned (i.e., in the outline they were described as “protagonist talks to a friend re Important Plot Point X”). The next three chapters developed the plot more quickly than I’d planned, but things were still mostly on track.

And then I hit the wall. And I recognized it.

Walls have come around for every novel I’ve written, usually in two or three places. For years, I put their existence down to a snarl of issues around my prewriting: my plot outlines were never detailed enough, I was too impatient to get started, I kept having better ideas mid-book, structure was one of the things I got “for free” so I never thought about it as much as I should, and on, and on.

This time, I had all that stuff. My normal excuses did not apply. The wall showed up a little later than it usually does (because of all that planning), but it was still there because it is part of my process.

It is a turning point in the story, where something major changes for the characters: Frodo agrees to take the Ring to Mount Doom, Elizabeth Bennet rejects Mr. Darcy’s proposal, Harry and Ron rescue Hermione from the troll and become friends with her.

At least, that’s how people who talk about story structure usually describe the wall, because story structure frameworks start from finished novels. And when I look at my own finished work and think about writing it, that’s right where the wall sits—at a turning point. But from a process point of view, it is the point in the story where I suddenly realize that the foundations I have laid in the first however-many chapters are leading (or could lead) somewhere different from where I expected. It’s not part of the design. It’s a point of new possibilities.

Writing the first five or seven or nine chapters is what provides all the little details that open up the possibilities that I couldn’t see from a three- or five- or twenty-page plot outline: the smart-mouth friend who might know more than he’s saying; the worried brother with his own reasons to interfere in the storyline; the mentor who is obviously (to me) far more than she seems. Which means that not even the most absolutely detailed batch of character notes, backstory, and plot outline will keep that wall from being there. Those people don’t come into clear focus until I write them. I need the rough draft to show me which “minor” characters really are just walk-on cab drivers and which ones have interesting secrets.

Oh, I could force the issue and just plow through according to my original outline…maybe. Plowing through would require either ignoring the new possibilities that have become available, or revising the first chapters to remove those possibilities. Personal experience suggests that doing either at this particular point will result in either exceptionally stubborn writer’s block or many chapters of even more rewriting later. I prefer to avoid both of those results.

What I have to do is climb up the wall, sit on the top, and plan a new route from this new vantage point while I catch my breath. The original map was very good, but from here, I can now see that there’s a bridge washed out on the planned route over there, a truck jackknifed in the middle of the highway over here, and a shortcut through some fascinating woods that the map doesn’t show that might get around both obstacles…or might end up somewhere very different from the first plan.

That’s fine. There’ll be another wall later on, where I can have lunch and correct course again if I need to. Probably in about six or eight more chapters.