Strategy and tactics aren’t synonyms, though in casual conversation they are often used as if they were. It’s understandable; they’re both about planning your actions so you can win. The difference, as I understand it, is that strategy is about planning to win the war; tactics are about planning to win the battle or encounter.
In other words, strategy is about the big picture – what to do overall; tactics is about the immediate, constantly changing situation right in front of you – how to do the current piece of it.
Unlike a real-life war, planning a novel can be done in either direction. That is, one can come up with the tactical situations – the scenes or events or occurrences the characters will face – and then look for the overall pattern so that one can put things together into a comprehensive strategy, or one can start with the overall strategy and work one’s way down into the tactics.
A lot of writers get into trouble by trying to move too rapidly from strategy to tactics, or vice versa. The writer knows that the Grand Finale of their book will be the revelation that the kingdom next door has been secretly sponsoring the pirates all along. They also know that the story opens with the cabin-boy-main-character’s ship being attacked by pirates. And then they stall, because they can’t see how to get from one to the other.
This writer is starting with two incidents at the “tactics” level and trying to instantly intuit the entirety of the “strategic” level. If you’re building from tactics to strategy, you need a lot more pieces, which you can get in one of two ways: First, by focusing on strategic questions like “why is the kingdom-next-door sponsoring pirates? Are they trying to take over, or just in need of money?” and “why is it such a huge shock that kingdom-next-door is behind the pirates?”; second, by focusing on tactical questions like “Does the cabin boy escape, or does he join the pirates?” and “What other cool pirate-related scenes can I think of that feel right for this story?”
The first sort of question starts filling things in at the strategic level; the second provides more tactical situations to build on. Eventually, one gets to the point where one has both the big picture plan and a lot of smaller scene-pieces to fit together into an actual plot.
Other writers start out with a general strategic plan – they’re going to write a story about how ordinary people band together to combat constant pirate attacks when their rulers won’t help, culminating in the revelation that the apparent apathy on the part of the rulers is a political decision because the pirates are sponsored by kingdom-next-door. And then they stall because they can’t figure out how to start, much less how to get from ordinary-people-battling-pirates to high-level-political-intrigue-between-kingdoms.
This set of writers is starting with a general strategy, but no tactical situations or details. Getting to the details means both expanding the strategic plan and diving into specifics like, Who is the main character? Where does he/she live? When and how does he/she first encounter the pirates? What motivates him/her to get involved with resisting the pirates? What things need to happen in order for her/him to get to the final revelation? Who will be present for the revelation, where does it happen, and how will it stop the pirates?
Several of the writers I know use a sort of hybrid approach, where they start with a strategic view with a few key incidents that are really clear. “The cabin boy is on a ship that’s attacked by pirates, and he’s captured. Some stuff happens, and then the pirates take another ship with an important person on board. The important person and the cabin boy team up to escape, and more stuff happens that leads them to the royal palace for the final confrontation.” These writers can write up to the point where “stuff happens,” but then they have to stop and work out the tactical details that will get them to the next known point.
For me, when I’m plotting or planning a book, I’m constantly moving back and forth between the Big Picture strategic questions and the tactical/detail/scene level. I don’t ever lay out a whole clear three-to-five-page overview of things and then start working out the scenes in order (which is what several of the how-to-plot-your-novel workbooks I’ve picked up recently seem to be recommending). I expand the strategy a little, and that gives me an idea for another couple of incidents I want to have happen (“The pirates can capture the eight-year-old prince in mid-book, and then he teams up with the cabin boy!” “The court wizard sends a sea serpent to destroy the pirate fleet!”). In order to fit those incidents in, I need a clearer and more detailed strategy (“The wizard is working with kingdom-next-door; he’s really trying to destroy the prince, which is what eventually leads the cabin boy to uncover the whole plot.”)
It’s all very messy and confusing. And of course for me, it continues to be messy and confusing because I keep coming up with new ideas, scenes, plot twists, and realizations as I write. (“Wait – the eight-year-old prince is really the son of the wizard, not the king, and the wizard will get his head chopped off if anyone finds out. Which they will because the prince has shown signs of being able to do magic, which is why the wizard is trying to get rid of him. Jerk.”) Sometimes they send the whole story off in a completely new direction and I have to re-do the whole strategy. (This is where the old saying “No battle plan ever survives first contact with the enemy” applies.)
This is normal. Planning a story isn’t a neat, linear process for any writer I know. Flexibility is important.
This is why I’m big on theme. *If* I can figure out what my theme is ahead of time, it helps me on both fronts. I.e., if my theme is the innate unpredictability of magic as opposed to the lack of imagination of logic, then I can set up a strategy of the wizard’s workings causing storms that sink ships, messing up the local economies, and the cold masterminds of the kingdom next door logically deciding that they should just take whatever they can in such a world.
At the tactical level, whenever I need something to happen, either the wizard trying to do something will suffice, or the eight-year-old prince, not realizing why the protective amulet he wears keeps making weird things (i.e. plot developments) happen…
“Some stuff happens” <– There is it, my process in a nutshell. 😉
The distinction between strategy and tactics is interesting. I’m going to have to ponder it some more to see how useful it will be in a production sense, but it’s definitely a different way to think about the problem.
Of course, coming up with the additional tactical details to fill in “stuff” and “more stuff” will probably still be a combination of bashing my head against a brick wall and picking my way along the narrow submerged path through a bog. At night. Without a walking stick. 😉
No plot survives contact with the characters.
The real problem is when the characters decide to do nothing.
O yes!
My main character once sat down and pointedly said she didn’t like where the story was going and wouldn’t cooperate until I’d fixed it—but of course she gave no clue what fixing it might entail.
I was at a loss until another writer suggested I come up with the worst thing I could do to her at that point in the story.
The protagonist looked around, stood up, and said, “Yes, that’s much better”, and on we went.