A Stitch in Time
Or, Idioms for Smart and Attractive People
Today’s Shelf Life is about making a stitch in time to save nine. It’s also about measuring twice so you only cut once. These are completely different things but they can both relate to sewing, which is a thing I know a little bit about. I would characterize myself as an amateur sewist. I sometimes make clothes and bags but I’m not actually good at it. A hobbyist. Nothing I’ve made has spontaneously self-destructed while I was wearing it.
People sometimes suggest that I could make a lot of money selling hand-sewn things on Etsy or similar, but even if something I made looks good enough to sell, it took so much time to make I’d end up making like five cents an hour. This is in part because I don’t always make the stitch in time that’s supposed to save nine.
I think this idiom actually means that if something begins to come apart, you should mend it right away and not let the rip get worse. The fix that would have taken one stitch when you first noticed it was needed takes nine if you let it go for a while. Little problems turn into big problems if you leave them to their own devices.
When I sew, I never, ever make a muslin (also known as a toile). A muslin is a test garment, so named I guess because you would in theory make it out of the cheapest available fabric, for instance, muslin. You can’t always use muslin, because you need to make a test garment—if you’re going to make one at all—out of a material that has the same qualities as what your real garment requires. Like you can’t make a test garment out of a non-stretch fabric if your final garment is going to be made from stretch fabric.
When making a muslin, sewists don’t usually do all the bells and whistles like neat buttonholes and finished seams, they just throw it together to get the fit and drape exactly right and make any necessary changes to their pattern before they cut and sew the fabric for their real garment. I don’t do any of this so the first time I make a new garment, I have to do some tailoring after the fact or (more likely), settle for a less-than-perfect fit and leave myself some notes to improve it the next time I make the same thing.
If I were going to tailor a garment after the fact to get a perfect fit, the muslin would have been the stitch in time that saved nine.
Measure once cut twice means to be extra careful when planning so you don’t make a mistake during execution that you can’t undo. I know this idiom from hearing about carpentry but it applies to sewing as well. I have cut out a piece backward before and it’s not a good feeling when you realize you’ve done it. I’m not good at visualizing things so I’m always in danger of cutting things the same that were meant to be mirror images, or vice versa.
Anyway today is about making a stitch in time to save time in your writing, by measuring twice to cut once: Or, planning ahead.
Planning a manuscript is out of the question for some writers; it’s just not part of their process. And for anyone who writes without planning ahead and gets the full story out of their brain onto paper—you’re living proof that not everyone needs to plan ahead before writing. This is not an article of universal advice about writing that everyone must follow to succeed, because there is no writing advice like that except that to be a writer you have to write, so, get writing.
For those who have no problem starting a story but have difficulty finishing a story, planning ahead may be the answer. The converse is this: For those who have no problem planning a story but never seem to start writing it, this is your sign to stop planning and take the plunge into your first draft. You can’t sell a beautifully detailed outline to a publisher. Well, fiction writers can’t. Nonfiction is a whole other ball game.
Side note: My word processor just correct “whole other ball game” to “whole other ballet” due to a typo I made and now I wish to commit to that mistake. Like what if you thought you were going to see The Nutcracker but then when you got there it was Die Hard: The Ballet? It would still be a Christmas ballet event, but not the one you thought you were going to see. Probably a better one. What is The Nutcracker even about?
I’ve talked to a lot of writers and people who would like to be writers over the years who have said to me (something along the lines of):
I have an idea for a story, and I start writing it, but then my motivation ebbs and I lose track of where I thought the story was going and I give up.
And then, some nonspecific amount of time later, the cycle repeats.
Planning can’t account for all of the reasons why a writer may give up midway through their story, most or every story; it’s only one of the reasons. Other common reasons include fear of failure/fear of criticism, lack of self-confidence/self-defeating behavior, and the inability or refusal to make time.
And sometimes it’s a lack of planning, or forethought, that catches a writer out. I know because it’s happened to me and it’s happened to most writers I know. If you have ever found yourself saying one of these:
I’ve written myself into a corner.
I’m not sure where the story goes next from here.
I know something’s missing but I’m not sure what.
I don’t know how to get the characters from where they are to where they need to be to move the plot forward.
I don’t know if I have all the characters I need to tell the story.
Those are hints that you’re stuck on something that planning ahead may have mitigated. The good news is, it’s never too late to hit pause and do some mid-story planning. Some companies I’ve worked at call this the “Q2 reforecast,” the idea being that you made your budget in Q3 or Q4 of last year and forecast what you expected for this year. Now that you’re at the end of this year’s Q2, you adjust your original forecast for the rest of this year with the knowledge you’ve gotten in the prior six months, rather than remaining devoted to a budget that may no longer make sense.
You can do this with your story too; there’s no rule that says you can’t. Maybe when you started, your idea had everything it needed to propel you through the story thus far, but just because that idea didn’t have legs to make it all the way to The End doesn’t mean it was a bad idea. It just means you need to put in a few extra stitches now to get everything back on track. It’s not too late to measure again. The great thing about writing versus sewing is you don’t have to take a pair of shears to a potentially very expensive fabric.
Just as you can still reforecast if there’s still some future ahead of you to . . . cast . . . you can execute planning your story anytime before it’s done. You needn’t give up on a stuck manuscript just because you started without a plan. You can always develop that plan now.
For instance, take the story back to outline. Begin by drafting a brief outline of your story so far. Make each part or each chapter (in the absence of parts) the top of your hierarchy with a line underneath for each scene. When you reach the end of outlining what you’ve written so far, ask yourself this: How far into the story do you think you’ve gotten, percentage-wise? Ten percent? Thirty percent? Are you in Act I? Or maybe in II or III? You can reference something like the Save the Cat beat sheet if you’re not sure.
Another option, especially if you have not gotten terribly far into the manuscript, is to rewrite or retell the part you’ve already written from another character’s or narrator’s point of view. Every character in a story—especially at the beginning of the story—has a different silo of knowledge. The characters haven’t come together yet to share information and learn things from each other. The exercise of telling the beginning of the story from another perspective can shake loose the missing piece and help you see where the story goes next.
Remember: “A stitch in time saves nine” doesn’t mean you make a muslin (or in this case, an outline) before you begin. It means that if a problem arises, it’s best to nip it in the bud while it’s a small problem rather than let it grow into a big problem. Getting a little stuck with your story is a little problem. Giving up on a manuscript because you’re not sure how to go forward is a big problem.
There are always times when giving up the ghost is the right decision. However, benching a manuscript should happen when the writer makes an informed decision not to move forward with it, and not because they feel defeated, overwhelmed, or hopeless to complete their story.
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