Planning? What planning?

My deficiencies in planning are revealed. My coworker Bloglily, she of the bright wit, well-turned phrase and sharp mind, had asked a number of us how we plan our writing projects.

At first, I missed the post. But three weeks later I found her question — and I’ve been mulling my answer since. Now that the holiday hullabaloo (and my cold) are over (mostly), I’ll hazard a reply.

An oversimplified answer would assess roles to each cerebral hemisphere. It’s no doubt more complex in actuality — but that much familiarity with my neural wiring would doubtless be even more confusing for you than me.

The first burst of inspiration I’ll attribute to my right mind — and it usually has me scribbling in notebooks or tapping away at a keyboard quickly, both writing and jotting notes. There’s a holistic element to the project here; in my mind’s eye I can see the totality of it and it’s just a matter of filling in the actual writing.

Oh yeah, that. Drafting the rest, linking sentence to sentence, one after the other, and polishing the whole piece — all that. This might be the left hemisphere side of things, and also perhaps where I usually run into trouble.

An early failed novel best makes my point. I had it worked out to a large degree in my mind, and over several years had jotted numerous notes, which I then poured into my first computer, a kludgy old Kaypro 2.

(That project on that old pc was also one of my few big data losses. Yup, I typed notes in for over two hours before I remembered to save–it was too much info for the old clunker and I lost it all. Aargh!

(This hasn’t happened often to me. when I worked for a high tech publisher in 2000 and 2001 I was careful during the power outages we suffered (during the Enron/California energy crisis) and while coworkers suffered mammoth data losses, I was ultra cautious and unscathed. I’ll never forget the power going out in our newsroom accompanied by anguished screams, and my relief as I scooped up the print-outs and left the darkened building to go work elsewhere. Forgive my smugness, but I really did BART back to the east bay, sit down at a comfy brewpub table and work my way through a big project over a nice pint of ale.

(The only other anguishing data loss I can recall was when I started blogging. Yeah, I drafted a whole post here in WordPress last December before trying to save or post and it all got dumped, lost. I learned that lesson, and now I draft in a word processing file and move it over to the blog.)

Those three parenthetic paragraphs above are perhaps an example of what dooms many of my writing projects — I’m easily distracted, sidetracked, and de-railed.

That early novel was like a crazy quilt, there were many pieces, each of which might have been fine as part of the fabric of a finished piece, but the novel failed under the weight of its disparate characters, themes, and even subplots.

But I learned from that. I learned that plot is king, and I try to bear that in mind now. Tomorrow I’ll post the second half of this piece, on how I try to keep my hemispheres working together.

Advertisement