Weird Flex But Okay
Flexibility for Planners
My least favorite word in the whole world might be plantser. I can’t say for sure it’s the number-one worst, but it’s up there with other terrible words like phlegm and utilize. What is a plantser, you ask? It’s not a fancy word for a pot to grow a plant in. It’s what you get when you cross a planner with a pantser. What is a—okay, hold up.
Planners and pantsers are supposedly the two types of fiction writers: The planners are those who plan out every last little detail of their story, plot, subplots, character arcs, and so on, before they ever set pen to paper. The pantsers are those who prefer to fly by the seat of their pants, diving right into the manuscript with nothing in mind for the manuscript ahead but vibes. I said “supposedly” in ostentatious italics because fiction writers aren’t neatly divided into planners and pantsers anyway. Most of us are somewhere on a spectrum from planner to pantser. Most writers I’ve spoken to admit they’re somewhere in the middle—they’ve got some stuff figured out ahead of time and they let other stuff come to them on the fly as they write. There’s not really a great gulf between. I suspect it’s more like a bell curve.
So a plantser is that person in the middle—which is actually many, many of us in the middle—who does a bit of planning and a bit of pantsing when we write. I don’t know that we need any of these words. I feel like they exist just to cause a ruckus on writing Twitter every few days when somebody tweets “Hey what’s better, planning or pantsing?” Stop pitting writers against writers. Pit the writers against someone who deserves it. Maybe the musicians.
I think most planners pants a bit here and there and most pantsers plan a bit before they start, but there are extremes at both ends and I’ve met both kinds. I have encountered people who say either extreme works for them—people who plan everything out scene by scene on a spreadsheet and people who dive in somewhere in the middle of the story with one scene in mind and nothing else—but I don’t have any fellows among my writing buddies who have found success this way. I know people who are extreme planners but they tend to get so tied up planning that starting the manuscript feels impossible (I have been there myself). I know people who are extreme pantsers but they often find themselves running out of plot after fifteen or twenty thousand words with nowhere else to go (that is also a place I have been). Among my writing buddies I personally know and talk craft with, most of us do most of our writing somewhere in the middle.
As a person who leans toward more planning myself, I’ve often given advice in Shelf Life to people who don’t have a good sense of how to plan short- or longform fiction. If you’re a diehard pantser, Shelf Life has lots of advice on how to pull back and plan a bit. But what if you are a diehard planner and you’re looking to pull back and live life in the fast lane a bit? Shelf Life has not had that much advice for you.
Today’s your lucky day.
I am a person who has written from both extremes (and sometimes I still do), and have personally experienced the perils of both types of extreme writing strategy. I go into a lot of short stories with nothing but the vaguest concept and a little prayer to come out on the other side with anything at all (“This egg emoji story, is it anything?”). I go into a lot of longform writing at the other extreme, having planned them to within an inch of their lives and sometimes even planned them so hard that I lost all interest in them and moved onto something else without even starting a draft.
If you have ever planned a novel so hard you never actually wrote it, let’s talk about why you do it and how to ease up a bit.
Planning is absolutely great. I like to plan all kinds of things besides what I’m going to write. I like to plan what I’m going to eat, when I’m going to do which tasks, what route I’ll take to my office when I go, where I’ll meet my mom for lunch—I like to know what’s going to happen, and when, ahead of time—all the time. This is because I am a basket of raging anxiety.
More about anxiety in one second. What I was saying is, planning is great, unless you keep planning so intently and for so long that you don’t begin the thing you were planning. This article is not here to say: Don’t plan. I’m in favor of planning. But if you plan to the point of inability to start drafting or inability to continue a draft if it starts to deviate from plan, then you need to find a way to flex a bit.
Anxiety is one of the main causes of overplanning. When you’re anxious and you don’t have a healthy way of dealing with your anxiety like tranquilizing yourself on enough psychiatric medications to knock out a horse, you might self-soothe by trying to exert control on as many things as you can to balance out the sense of overwhelming lack of control that anxiety causes. If you have anxiety about your ability to start or finish a manuscript, you might try to correct for that by going into planning overdrive. I’ve definitely felt this and I’ve spoken to others who have experienced the same thing—there’s a feeling that if you get your plot, story, characters, and everything else to the umpteenth degree of “planned out,” then you won’t have to worry anymore about being able to sit down and knock out the manuscript—because you will have controlled for every possible thing.
Anxiety is one of the biggest reasons people engage in task avoidance. When you consciously or subconsciously think of a task as something you don’t want to do—because it’s too hard, or boring, or it makes you feel overwhelmed, or you’re not sure where to start, or you’re afraid of failing—you might engage in task-avoidance behavior to put off starting or finishing it. Task avoidance takes the form of doing an easier or more enjoyable task instead of a hard or unpleasant one. If you sit down to write and then look around and find yourself:
Down an internet rabbit hole for forty-five minutes looking up name meanings to find the perfect moniker for your main character’s second cousin thrice removed, or
In the middle of doing housework that wasn’t urgent, or
Gone back to your outline for a little more planning even though you said you were done, or
Suddenly exhausted out of nowhere and desperate for a nap—
Then you might be task avoidant without realizing it. In the case of doing “research” or planning for your writing, you might think, “No, this is part of my creative process! I’m not avoiding writing, I’m doing prewriting!” Sometimes that’s true and sometimes you’re kidding yourself. Task avoidance is normal behavior that everybody does sometimes but is an especial favorite of those with chronic stress, ADHD, and anxiety disorders.
Take a step back from your writing planning and ask yourself honestly: Am I planning more than any person could reasonably need to before starting my draft because I’m avoiding starting my draft? If the answer is yes, take a look at the following handful of likely reasons you’re avoiding the task of drafting and see any of them sound familiar. While there are plenty of causes of task avoidance, there’s one easy solution that trounces just about all of them.
“I Don’t Know How to Start” or “The Task Is Too Big”
Common reason for task avoidance: You’re not sure where and how to start your draft, or the idea of the draft as a single task is so large and unwieldy it’s overwhelming you. Nothing will turn you off doing a task like being overwhelmed by it (in my experience). I put these two things together in one section cause they go hand in hand—they’re both causes of overwhelm—and the solution for both is the same: Break up the task into smaller parts.
If the task of writing a story draft is so big you can’t get your mind all the way around its perimeter, it might help to remind yourself of the building blocks of any narrative—acts, chapters, scenes. Now: Don’t run right back to your notebook and start the planning phase all over again breaking everything down into smaller and smaller pieces. That’s what your brain is already telling you to do and why you got stuck in planning mode in the first place.
Instead: Picture one scene in your mind—just one scene—and write that. Remind yourself that you do not need to worry about completing the entire draft right now—or ever, in fact. All writing is practice, for one thing. And for another, dialogue, character development, worldbuilding, interesting scenes, and everything else can be repurposed later for a different story if you end up scrapping what you have. No writing is ever a waste.
Don’t know where to start? Not sure what scene comes first? Good news: Doesn’t matter. Just pick any scene. I would venture that even the pantsiest pantsers have a couple of scenes in their mind before they begin drafting that jump out out and beg to be written. Write one of those. It doesn’t have to be at the beginning. Write the end. Write something from the middle.
But, importantly, reconceive of the task. You’re not sitting down to write a 90,000-word novel. You’re sitting down to write one scene from a 90,000-word novel. That’s a way more manageable task.
“Drafting Is Less Fun Than Planning”
Next big cause of task avoidance? The task you need to start (drafting!) isn’t a dopamine machine but you know something that is—Outlining! Planning! Mocking up your future book cover in Canva!—so you’re gonna do that instead. Dopamine is the neurotransmitter that makes you feel good and your brain makes it when you’re anticipating a reward. If achievement and task completion are rewarding for you, then they can cause dopamine release.
Write a manuscript, or part of one
Feel rewarded by your success
Get dopamine
This is straightforward, but humans are lazy apex predators and our brains are always looking for an easier way to get that dopamine release. You know what’s easier than writing a manuscript to get a sense of achievement? Playing a video game for a little while until it makes a little jingle sound and tells you “Achievement Unlocked!” Or unloading the dishwasher. Or throwing a load of laundry in the machine. You know you’ll feel great about yourself if you finish a chapter or a scene or a page or five hundred words—but your brain knows there are easier achievements all around you that can give you the same chemical hit and your brain is going to want you to do the easier things instead.
The trick—as I alluded to above—is the same for this as it is for overwhelm. Break the task (drafting your manuscript) down into something smaller. This is still the solution, but the reason it works is different: Your brain will draw you toward the easiest and cheapest source of dopamine. You can conquer this by making your writing task the easiest and cheapest source of dopamine. Make the task smaller than all the other tasks that are competing for your attention by shrinking the success condition to get yourself started. If “a chapter” is too big, try “a scene”; if “a scene” is too much, try “ten minutes.” Set the success condition for your task to a level where you can get a little dopamine from your success without flogging yourself across a distant finish line. This is how video games work, too. They throw all kinds of different rewards at you early in the game (Level up! New item! Quest completed!) to get you hooked on the reward-receiving process and then they start upping the time between rewards. Gamify your writing.
What if the writing doesn’t need to get smaller but it needs to get easier? Write something easier. Not every part of your manuscript is going to be equally difficult to write. Some parts are complicated and require more mental resources. Some parts are very personal and require more emotional resources. Don’t start with those parts. Start with something easier. And remember: It doesn’t have to be good. In fact, it shouldn’t be.
“Can’t Fail if I Never Get Started”
Last but not least, circling back around to fear: The fear that if you undertake something, you will fail in it. I talked about this just the other day (Till You Make It), so it’s fresh in my mind. Maybe the reason you’re planning forever and dancing around starting that draft is because you think, “beginning something is the first step in failing at it.” If you never start your draft, you won’t give up halfway through. You won’t complete it and find that it’s bad. You’ll never have to query it and get a rejection. You’ll never self-publish it to zero sales if you don’t write it.
You’re never going to believe this but the solution, once again, is to break that sucker down into something smaller—break it down till the success condition is small enough that you know you can crush it. If you’ve never done something before—never written a novel, for instance—then how do you know you can do it? What evidence do you have to indicate you’ll be successful? How do you know whether your delicate constitution can handle it? You don’t, you have none, and you don’t.
But you probably know you can write 500 words. Do a word count on your outline, if you’re a forever-planner I bet it’s longer than 500 words. You’ve written emails for work longer than 500 words. You’ve probably written argumentative internet comments longer than 500 words. I bet you could feel confident in writing 500 words because you’ve done it enough times before that it’s a piece of cake.
So don’t set your success condition at “write a complete novel,” set it at “write a 500-word scene.” A small number of words but a concrete unit of story. A full scene, however small. One specific and complete part of a story. There’s a character in it, they experience a motivation, they do something.
If you did that—just that much—every couple days, guess what you’d have at the end of a year?
I suffer with task avoidance, having been diagnosed with both ADHD and anxiety disorder and to be candid with you I leave the ADHD untreated because I have too many other medications I’m dealing with. If you find you avoid drafting by drowning yourself in planning I am right there with you. I know this feel. The trick isn’t flogging yourself to write more. Try allowing yourself to write less.
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