All Planning, No Execution
How to Get Out of the Planning Trap
Today’s Shelf Life is for the planners out there. Those who have a list of their lists, please raise your hand. You can’t see me but I am raising my hand. I have a list of my lists. The master list. It’s the index in my bullet journal, basically. Anyone who bullet journals has one. It’s not that weird. Anyway do you own a planner? Today’s Shelf Life might be for you.
What I’m actually on today is those writers who plan forever and avoid taking that first plunge into drafting their manuscript. I’ve personally known writers who have this problem. I’ve encountered writers asking for help with this problem on social. In fact, I have this problem sometimes, too. And as a person who has overcome it to actually write some manuscripts, and has coached others through it, I feel qualified to share some strategies with you to get out of the planning slump if you’re stuck in it.
The first thing you want to do is identify why you are stuck in the planning phase and not graduating to drafting. First, ask yourself: Is the planning truly complete? Because I’m not suggesting you begrudge yourself time spent planning a story. Remember, all writing-related work should count toward your writing time. Drafting is not the only writing. Planning, outlining, editing, revision, querying—that’s all writing. Lying in bed imagining banter? Yes that’s writing.
But if you find yourself stuck planning when it’s past time to be drafting, you have a problem. Question is: Do you know why you have this problem? Here are some common reasons people get stuck in their outlining-forever era:
Overwhelm
Perfectionism
Fear of failure
Fear of success
Doubt in one’s writing ability
Let’s talk about these causes of planning paralysis and you can see if any of them might apply to you.
Overwhelm
The idea of writing the story feels overwhelming and they are trying to break it down into small enough bits that it no longer feels that way. You break it down chapter by chapter, but it’s still overwhelming. So you outline it, but it still feels overwhelming. Maybe outlining it to a greater level of detail will help? Still overwhelming. Maybe a character matrix? Or a mind map? Or index cards?
Listen: There is no amount of planning that will make the process of writing a story not-overwhelming. If the fact that you have 80,000 words to write and you’re at zero is overwhelming you, the only way to get past that overwhelm is to start knocking out words. If not knowing where to start is overwhelming you, then start anywhere—start with the scene that is most vivid in your mind. That will deflate the overwhelm a bit. If the complexity of the story is overwhelming, dumb it down a bit. You can always add subplots in revision.
If you think you’re stuck in the planning phase due to overwhelm, look back over all of your planning materials and see if you can isolate a scene or two that you can tackle with confidence. Maybe they’re simple scenes without too many characters or maybe they’re scenes that you know backward and forward or that you’ve planned to the Nth degree. Instead of sitting down to “draft your novel,” sit down to draft one scene.
Sometimes you just need to break the seal and the words start flowing out—like the ketchup bottle at Denny’s. Stick your knife up there and shake something loose.
Perfectionism
The perfectionist believes that nothing is worth doing that isn’t done perfectly, and since writing is never perfect—especially not the first draft!—there’s no point. Starting an endeavor when you’re a perfectionist is really hard and intimidating. It’s much more comfortable to stay in the planning mode forever.
Conquering perfectionism generally—like as a personality trait—is beyond the scope of Shelf Life. I can’t give advice to cure your perfectionism. I can just offer tips to get you over the perfectionism hump so you start drafting your manuscript.
In my experience the best way to get past perfectionism is to set realistic goals. “I’m going to draft a novel in three months” or “I’m going to lay down a publication-quality first draft” are not realistic goals—at least not for someone starting out. Are there authors who can do it? Yes, sure. But probably not on their first try.
I’ll sometimes do perfectionist math, with the help of a spreadsheet because dyscalculia, and I’ll determine something like—“okay 1000 words in a sitting is an easy pace for me and I need 70,000 words to complete this draft so 70 days or 10 weeks to finish should be easy!” But then I miss a day here, or I write fewer than 1000 words in a sitting there, and before I know if I’ve wrecked my beautiful plan and then I get discouraged. But in reality, 1000 words a day wasn’t a realistic goal. There are already several days a week I’m writing Shelf Life, and those days I don’t usually write 1000 words on top of that. And there are days when work kicks my butt, or when I’m out all day, or when I just don’t feel like writing. The best laid plans, et cetera.
So making sure your goals are truly realistic for you is the first key to conquering perfectionism and starting your draft. The second is to be kind to yourself. Maybe the words on the page won’t be as good as they were in your head. So what? The words on the page are actually never as good as the words in your head. Give yourself a break and get some writing done.
Fear of Failure
You know, if you never start your draft then your draft will never be a failure. Your draft can’t be bad if it’s not written. You can’t trunk a manuscript because it failed to sell if you never wrote it. Readers can’t give one-star reviews to a book that doesn’t exist.
If there’s a little voice in there telling you that your manuscript will never amount to anything, you may have subconsciously decided to prove it wrong by not writing that manuscript. That’s the surest way to make sure the voice doesn’t turn out to be right. Or you might believe that you can plan your manuscript out in exact enough detail that your little voice will say, “Oh never mind, clearly you’ve got this.”
In reality, there’s nothing you can do to be sure your book will succeed. There’s no game plan you can follow to make sure you get picked up by an agent; no formula you can employ to write a bestseller. No amount of outlining aforethought guarantees a successful book. However, there is an amount of outlining and planning that guarantees you won’t have a bestseller—that is, when you never stop planning and start drafting.
If it’s the fear of failure that’s got you stalled, this is your mantra: The only surefire way to fail is to never begin.
Fear of Success
But what if you do write your whole manuscript, what then? Other people might read it: That’s a terribly vulnerable position to be in—other people reading your work—trust me, I know this. And then you might have to submit it to agents and editors, who might reject it? Horrifying. And maybe you’ll publish it and then any old person off the street can just read your innermost thoughts? An absolute disaster. And what if the book is a big success? Then you’ll be expected to do it over and over again until you die.
The fear of success can be just as paralyzing as the fear of failure. After all, you know what happens if your book doesn’t sell to a publisher or if you don’t finish—or start—writing it: Nothing. The status quo does not change. Everything stays exactly the same. You stay in your comfort zone. You don’t have to set a single toe outside the boundaries of what you already know.
If you think this might be you, remember: You don’t have to show your draft to anyone if you don’t want to. You never have to query and agent, you never have to send a proposal to an editor, you never have to self publish—if you don’t want to. The first step is just drafting the manuscript and it doesn’t require any of those other things. You can write the manuscript and keep it for yourself forever if you want to. Nobody says you can’t.
Self-Doubt
Finally, there’s the belief that you’re not up to the task. That you were up to the task of planning a novel but somehow you won’t be up to executing on that plan. You just don’t believe you can—it’s not that you think you’ll write it and it will fail, or you’ll write it and it won’t be perfect, or you’ll write it and it’ll be successful and the success will push you out of your comfort zone. It’s that you are worried you’ll try to draft a novel and you won’t be able to do it.
Real talk: A lot of people start a novel and don’t finish it. This isn’t because they can’t, although it may feel like that to them. It’s rather that they don’t want to. They start the drafting process and get demoralized by how much work it is, how long it takes, how much emotional energy it requires, and so on.
Is it possible that you’ll start your novel and not finish it? Yes, it’s possible. But if that’s what you’re afraid of, there’s only one way to find out, which is to start. To write a novel, you must both start and finish it. (You also have to write the part in the middle, which is the worst.) If you start, you might finish or you might not. If you don’t start, you certainly won’t finish.
I believe that if you can write three chapters, you can write any number of chapters. Infinite chapters. Starting is much harder than finishing. So if you’re procrastinating in the planning stage forever because you’re afraid you won’t finish what you start—just start and see where starting takes you.
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