My Planning Process
Feb. 19th, 2021 09:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
galadriel1010For a long while now, I've been planning to write up something about my planning process, because I am a definite planner and my process is long and convoluted and multicoloured and multimedia and, most importantly, works really well for me.
I've looked at processes like Snowflake and SaveTheCat and others, and even started designing my own method based on the PRINCE2 project management principals, but I keep rolling back to the same system that I've been using more or less consistently for years. Once upon a time, back in the mists of the noughties, I was a bit of a pantser. I'd have a concept and a goal in mind, but not an outline or any idea of how to get from start to finish. What I also had was a lot more time and, honestly, low standards for my writing. I can't look back on my stuff from that period with anything other than pride that I've come so far. There's a 200000 word fanfiction in my back catalogue that will, one day, with a lot of rewriting, be a decent 50k novel. It is not decent right now, because I only worked out where I was going with it a fair way into it, and stuffed it with far too much story. And, regardless of the quality, it took me 10 years to finish because I stopped loving it. That was time I could have spent working on things I did enjoy but no, I gave it to that pile of nonsense.
So in the aim of never doing that again, I have developed a system that works for me and produces works I do not hate. This is, however, my first attempt to codify it. Wish me luck.
The Planning Process
I'm going to use as an example the most recent longfic I finished. It's called Nine Lessons and Carol (E rated for one scene in chapter 5) and it's a 49500-word Sherlock fanfiction about Mycroft Holmes, Greg Lestrade and the mysterious Greg Lestrade's Wife. I got fed up of seeing her as the bad guy in every story and went looking for OT3 fics. There aren't any, so I had to write one. The original kick, I believe, came from FailFandomAnon. One thing led to another and before I knew it I was at step 1, which is…
1. Summarise in a sentence.
This is the first stage, what I might add to my Trello or Airtable, or scribble down on a post-it or in a notebook. One line with enough detail to remind me what the idea was when I look at it in 6 months. If I can't understand it, it's going to be jettisoned next time I organise my boards.
For Nine Lessons the summary was Disaster Bicroft lusts after Greg and Mrs Lestrade, who was his teacher. That was enough for the idea to stick around for stage 2…
2. Think for ages.
Stage 2 involves a lot of thinking. In all probability I'll have an existing project on the go, and I can kick around ideas until I have enough free space to do something about them. I do a lot of thinking on the canal towpath when I'm out with the dog; so much so that I have a Pavlovian response to the path down into the woods just like he does, although not the same response. I'll talk through passages of dialogue with myself, look up real world events to tie my story to, search for houses on Rightmove and Zoopla, and generally build up the world one bit at a time. I'll know the story is ready to start cooking properly when I have the following:
a. Framing – The story format I'm going to use. For Nine Lessons I broke the story down into 9 key events, the lessons of Mycroft's life.
b. Endgame – The final chapter, or epilogue, or whatever. Where I want my characters to be at the end of the story.
c. Characters – Which canon characters do I want, and who are my OCs? For original fiction this takes a lot longer, because they need the whole world building around them, but even for fanfiction it can take a while for the OCs to come together. Carol, though, sauntered out of my mind, sat down next to me and told me what to do, Rudy just turned up sounding like Stephen Fry (and successfully stopped my Mycroft sounding like Stephen Fry), and the other OCs arrived as I needed them. The whole story came together very easily at this stage.
3. Summarise at length
You'll be surprised to learn, I'm sure, that verbosity is something I'm good at. Once I have the framework of the story in place I then write out a full page, or more, summary of the plot from start to finish. For a story I'm working on at the moment this is over 4500 words, and I suspect that will be about 1/10 of the final wordcount. If I can, I like to do this stage by hand in fountain pen ink, but 4500 words is a lot to write out by hand. If I can outline in shimmery pink or purple ink, though, why wouldn't I?
This summary is a blow by blow account, complete with scraps of significant dialogue or at least summaries of the exchanges, locations noted, the works. It's the story in condensed form, if you took out all my lovingly described weather, lengthy monologues, and the awkward kisses. But why would you want to do that? That's why we don't leave it at this stage and instead move on to…
4. Diarise.
Using either Excel or AirTable (a website I'm just getting into, watch this space) I'll then lay out the events of the story arranged by date. If it's a significant event that gets mentioned in the plot but doesn't happen in it, it goes in. Each character has their date of birth listed so their age at the time is there. I use a table for this in Excel, and I'll do a post later on how I use Excel. I'll also do one on AirTable, once I've worked it out a bit better.
In Excel I end up with a table that looks like this:
5. Check acts and arcs
With my events organised by date, I then check that I have the acts and arcs in place. Can I break the story down into 2-4 sections, and do I hit all my major story beats? The beats I use vary by project. For a romance story I use a five point arc, for a more in-depth work like a heist or casefic it's an 8 point arc. Again, I'll return to these later, but as long as I have those then I know I'm hitting the key notes I need in the story and with the timeline I can also make sure that they're paced out. If I'm hitting them all in the fist 6 months and then having lots of events that don't contribute to any of them stretched over the next 10 years, I need to do some thinking about it. Basically I have a 6 month plot and an epilogue. Thankfully with Nine Lessons I had my points spread over many, many years. It's a slow burn.
6.Outline
Haven't we already done this? No we haven't. This is another stage that's best done with men and paper and happens in 3 stages.
1. A brief summary of each act
2. Within each act, a brief summary of each chapter
3. Within each chapter, a brief summary of each scene.
In theory this will be 4 pages for the act and chapter summaries and then one page per chapter. They might be a single sentence or a short paragraph. For Nine Lessons I had a summary that was just "They have sex", and another that was "Mycroft and Greg bump into each other at random. Greg suggests they go out for dinner. Mycroft thinks Greg is still as hot as he was back in the day. Surprised to actually get a call about dinner the next day, obviously it's a bad idea so he says yes". Or something like that.
7.Set up in WriteWay
Now it's time to move into WriteWay, which is my favourite writing software. I've been using it over a decade now and cannot recommend it highly enough, especially as it's free. I paid for it when it was the Windows alternative to Scrivener and have been using it ever since. It's a bit more bare-bones than Scrivener, but it does have a lot of useful features like character detail archives and research tabs that I never use, without ever feeling cluttered. Again, I'll do a post on Write-Way at a later date, so I'll leave the evangelising there for now.
I set up my acts, chapters and scenes in the storyboard, set my word target (yeah, I overshot on this one a bit), and usually I'm ready to go at that point. My research for this story included a lot of property brochures and a couple of screenshots of maps. As you can see, my plot notes in this are pretty bare-bones. This is probably why I went so far over on word count (but I'm glad I did, it's a lovely story).
8. Start Writing
And the only thing to do then is to start writing. I store my writing in WriteWay but bounce between that, Word on my phone and laptop, and sometimes hand-written in a journal (stash post to come later too, why not?). Hand-writing is good for getting the words going when I'm stuck, Word is good for when I'm lying in the bath or those days when I used to catch buses, and WriteWay is just a solid word processor designed for novels. Doesn't matter where or how I do it, so long as I start somehow.
9. Review 4-6 regularly.
And then I review constantly as I go. I do a lot of writing in sprints or stretches, and before I start the next I go over what I've just written to check I'm on the right track. At the end of a chapter I'll compare it with my plan for that chapter and check that I've not deviated too far from the plan. If I have, it's time to either have a second go or, more likely, review the plan from that point onwards. This is the bit I really got from PRINCE2, because it's basically an end of stage review. Whenever I reach a significant point, I review back to the previous one. It keeps me on track (although not down to my word target) and stops me getting lost because I've started on a chapter despite deviating from the plan in the previous one and they now don't match up. Review, refresh, reorient. Then write some more.
Speaking of which… that's 1800 words of procrastination. Back to the notebooks.
I've looked at processes like Snowflake and SaveTheCat and others, and even started designing my own method based on the PRINCE2 project management principals, but I keep rolling back to the same system that I've been using more or less consistently for years. Once upon a time, back in the mists of the noughties, I was a bit of a pantser. I'd have a concept and a goal in mind, but not an outline or any idea of how to get from start to finish. What I also had was a lot more time and, honestly, low standards for my writing. I can't look back on my stuff from that period with anything other than pride that I've come so far. There's a 200000 word fanfiction in my back catalogue that will, one day, with a lot of rewriting, be a decent 50k novel. It is not decent right now, because I only worked out where I was going with it a fair way into it, and stuffed it with far too much story. And, regardless of the quality, it took me 10 years to finish because I stopped loving it. That was time I could have spent working on things I did enjoy but no, I gave it to that pile of nonsense.
So in the aim of never doing that again, I have developed a system that works for me and produces works I do not hate. This is, however, my first attempt to codify it. Wish me luck.
The Planning Process
I'm going to use as an example the most recent longfic I finished. It's called Nine Lessons and Carol (E rated for one scene in chapter 5) and it's a 49500-word Sherlock fanfiction about Mycroft Holmes, Greg Lestrade and the mysterious Greg Lestrade's Wife. I got fed up of seeing her as the bad guy in every story and went looking for OT3 fics. There aren't any, so I had to write one. The original kick, I believe, came from FailFandomAnon. One thing led to another and before I knew it I was at step 1, which is…
1. Summarise in a sentence.
This is the first stage, what I might add to my Trello or Airtable, or scribble down on a post-it or in a notebook. One line with enough detail to remind me what the idea was when I look at it in 6 months. If I can't understand it, it's going to be jettisoned next time I organise my boards.
For Nine Lessons the summary was Disaster Bicroft lusts after Greg and Mrs Lestrade, who was his teacher. That was enough for the idea to stick around for stage 2…
2. Think for ages.
Stage 2 involves a lot of thinking. In all probability I'll have an existing project on the go, and I can kick around ideas until I have enough free space to do something about them. I do a lot of thinking on the canal towpath when I'm out with the dog; so much so that I have a Pavlovian response to the path down into the woods just like he does, although not the same response. I'll talk through passages of dialogue with myself, look up real world events to tie my story to, search for houses on Rightmove and Zoopla, and generally build up the world one bit at a time. I'll know the story is ready to start cooking properly when I have the following:
a. Framing – The story format I'm going to use. For Nine Lessons I broke the story down into 9 key events, the lessons of Mycroft's life.
b. Endgame – The final chapter, or epilogue, or whatever. Where I want my characters to be at the end of the story.
c. Characters – Which canon characters do I want, and who are my OCs? For original fiction this takes a lot longer, because they need the whole world building around them, but even for fanfiction it can take a while for the OCs to come together. Carol, though, sauntered out of my mind, sat down next to me and told me what to do, Rudy just turned up sounding like Stephen Fry (and successfully stopped my Mycroft sounding like Stephen Fry), and the other OCs arrived as I needed them. The whole story came together very easily at this stage.
3. Summarise at length
You'll be surprised to learn, I'm sure, that verbosity is something I'm good at. Once I have the framework of the story in place I then write out a full page, or more, summary of the plot from start to finish. For a story I'm working on at the moment this is over 4500 words, and I suspect that will be about 1/10 of the final wordcount. If I can, I like to do this stage by hand in fountain pen ink, but 4500 words is a lot to write out by hand. If I can outline in shimmery pink or purple ink, though, why wouldn't I?
This summary is a blow by blow account, complete with scraps of significant dialogue or at least summaries of the exchanges, locations noted, the works. It's the story in condensed form, if you took out all my lovingly described weather, lengthy monologues, and the awkward kisses. But why would you want to do that? That's why we don't leave it at this stage and instead move on to…
4. Diarise.
Using either Excel or AirTable (a website I'm just getting into, watch this space) I'll then lay out the events of the story arranged by date. If it's a significant event that gets mentioned in the plot but doesn't happen in it, it goes in. Each character has their date of birth listed so their age at the time is there. I use a table for this in Excel, and I'll do a post later on how I use Excel. I'll also do one on AirTable, once I've worked it out a bit better.
In Excel I end up with a table that looks like this:
5. Check acts and arcs
With my events organised by date, I then check that I have the acts and arcs in place. Can I break the story down into 2-4 sections, and do I hit all my major story beats? The beats I use vary by project. For a romance story I use a five point arc, for a more in-depth work like a heist or casefic it's an 8 point arc. Again, I'll return to these later, but as long as I have those then I know I'm hitting the key notes I need in the story and with the timeline I can also make sure that they're paced out. If I'm hitting them all in the fist 6 months and then having lots of events that don't contribute to any of them stretched over the next 10 years, I need to do some thinking about it. Basically I have a 6 month plot and an epilogue. Thankfully with Nine Lessons I had my points spread over many, many years. It's a slow burn.
6.Outline
Haven't we already done this? No we haven't. This is another stage that's best done with men and paper and happens in 3 stages.
1. A brief summary of each act
2. Within each act, a brief summary of each chapter
3. Within each chapter, a brief summary of each scene.
In theory this will be 4 pages for the act and chapter summaries and then one page per chapter. They might be a single sentence or a short paragraph. For Nine Lessons I had a summary that was just "They have sex", and another that was "Mycroft and Greg bump into each other at random. Greg suggests they go out for dinner. Mycroft thinks Greg is still as hot as he was back in the day. Surprised to actually get a call about dinner the next day, obviously it's a bad idea so he says yes". Or something like that.
7.Set up in WriteWay
Now it's time to move into WriteWay, which is my favourite writing software. I've been using it over a decade now and cannot recommend it highly enough, especially as it's free. I paid for it when it was the Windows alternative to Scrivener and have been using it ever since. It's a bit more bare-bones than Scrivener, but it does have a lot of useful features like character detail archives and research tabs that I never use, without ever feeling cluttered. Again, I'll do a post on Write-Way at a later date, so I'll leave the evangelising there for now.
I set up my acts, chapters and scenes in the storyboard, set my word target (yeah, I overshot on this one a bit), and usually I'm ready to go at that point. My research for this story included a lot of property brochures and a couple of screenshots of maps. As you can see, my plot notes in this are pretty bare-bones. This is probably why I went so far over on word count (but I'm glad I did, it's a lovely story).
8. Start Writing
And the only thing to do then is to start writing. I store my writing in WriteWay but bounce between that, Word on my phone and laptop, and sometimes hand-written in a journal (stash post to come later too, why not?). Hand-writing is good for getting the words going when I'm stuck, Word is good for when I'm lying in the bath or those days when I used to catch buses, and WriteWay is just a solid word processor designed for novels. Doesn't matter where or how I do it, so long as I start somehow.
9. Review 4-6 regularly.
And then I review constantly as I go. I do a lot of writing in sprints or stretches, and before I start the next I go over what I've just written to check I'm on the right track. At the end of a chapter I'll compare it with my plan for that chapter and check that I've not deviated too far from the plan. If I have, it's time to either have a second go or, more likely, review the plan from that point onwards. This is the bit I really got from PRINCE2, because it's basically an end of stage review. Whenever I reach a significant point, I review back to the previous one. It keeps me on track (although not down to my word target) and stops me getting lost because I've started on a chapter despite deviating from the plan in the previous one and they now don't match up. Review, refresh, reorient. Then write some more.
Speaking of which… that's 1800 words of procrastination. Back to the notebooks.
