To Plan or Not to Plan - BFI Week 2

Is planning before writing actually necessary?

I’m a type-A person, and there are few things I love more than lists, schedules, and clear instructions. I adore planning.

But I’ve learned through experience that art does not adhere to rigid expectations. Every idea I dream up never looks the same in the first draft, and the first draft never looks the same as the final draft.

I have written four full-length novel manuscripts (plus rewrites and subsequent drafts), and I haven’t used a standardized way of planning for any of them. For the novel I wrote for my Master’s project, I spent more than two months worldbuilding, outlining, and creating characters. For my more recent project, I was burnt out on planning, so I bucked my usual system and instead hit the ground running with minimal preparation.

It came back to bite me in the editing process, where I then had to do the work I’d skipped in the beginning; coming up with a clear plot outline, fixing worldbuilding holes, and fleshing out characters who were surprise additions. For my next project, I’ll likely return to heavier planning in the prewriting phase. I still enjoyed the process of writing my recent project, but it definitely had a different rhythm to the work because of my lack of planning.

You have to plan your novel. It’s just a question of when. If you don’t do it before, you’ll have to fix it later. Generally, writers fall to one of two sides in a spectrum: gardeners or architects.

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George R.R. Martin, author of the A Song of Ice and Fire series (one of my personal favorites), introduced the idea of gardeners and architects. Architects, he claims, “plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they're going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there's going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up.”

Gardeners, on the other hand, “dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if they planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don't know how many branches it's going to have, they find out as it grows.”

I tend to lean more towards the architect side. But, as I’ve said so many times already, there is no right way to do it. Write in the way that comes naturally to you, rather than trying to force yourself into a method that feels more akin to torture than fun. If you want to garden— to dive into exploratory writing to develop a story— then go for it! You’ll have issues to fix later, but who cares? No one can plan everything, and no one writes a perfect first draft.

That being said, when you’re ready to plan (whether that’s before or after writing), what should you focus on?

This is Part Two of my Blueprint for Improvement series. Most of the advice in here is geared towards fiction, but can be adapted for other forms of writing.

Planning a Story in Three Steps

There are three main aspects to planning a story: worldbuilding, character creation, and plot outlining. These aspects can be done in any order, and I often find myself bouncing between them. For example, you might first have a vague concept of the story, then move to fleshing out the characters, which sparks an idea for the world, which leads to refining the plot outline, etc.

Start with whichever aspect appeals to you most, and go where inspiration leads. The following explanations are very cursory; you can find detailed online guides and books for each specific aspect. I’ll link some of my favorites below. I’m also happy to dive more deeply into any one of these for a future blog post!

Keep track of these aspects however you’d like— on a program like Scrivener (my favorite), in Google Docs/Microsoft Word, on sticky notes, or in a binder or diary. The world is your oyster!

1. Worldbuilding

The extent to which you need to worldbuild depends on the kind of story you’re trying to tell. I tend to write fantasy, which (alongside sci-fi) often requires heavy worldbuilding. But even if you’re writing a story set in our world, you aren’t off the hook for worldbuilding! You’ll either need to do research on an existing location, or you’ll need to spend time fleshing out a fictional location that’s meant to feel like the real world.

Worldbuilding is, first and foremost, about creating a sense of place. Your readers need to feel tethered to your story’s location, whether it takes place in a mystical Fae forest or in an office building. You should always worldbuild more than what actually ends up in your story— you need to know far more than the readers in order to create a setting that feels expansive and consistent.

The world you create should revolve around your characters and the story you’re telling. Details should remain relevant to what’s going on in the scene. Oftentimes, I’ll get excited and drop too much information in, which can overwhelm readers— but that’s what editing is for! Be careful not to get stuck in the worldbuilding phase. It can be quite fun, but it can also keep you from actually writing your story.

For an excellent source on worldbuilding, check out Jerry Jenkin’s guide.

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2. Character Creation

Character creation is my favorite part of planning a story. I absolutely love diving deep into the psyches of each character, and exploring their relationships with each other. Stories are nothing without good characters— we need someone to root for, we need to see how they react to obstacles, and we need to see them grow and change.

Protagonists and major characters will require more outlining than side characters, though I recommend keeping a list of every named character that comes into your story. I love using outlines like Jeannie Ruesch’s to keep track of the physical traits and logistical information related to my characters.

At the very least, you should know the following about your protagonists: their beliefs about the world they live in, their wants/desires, their faults and strengths, and their primary relationships. This ties deeply into worldbuilding, as the characters in your story will be shaped by the culture they grew up in, and the story will come from the interaction between who they are and the world they live in.

For antagonists, you should know how they oppose the main character, and why. Every person justifies their actions to themselves, so you need to know their reasoning for the actions they take. Side characters should have their own hopes and dreams (whether or not these become apparent to your readers), though you can usually get away with just a few sentences keeping track of their appearance and motive.

You also need to highlight relationships between characters— if your protagonist has a parent they interact with, or a love interest, or a friend. These relationships will mostly be fleshed out in the writing itself, but you should have a general idea of the tone of these relationships before you start drafting.

3. Plot Outline

Finally, we have the nitty gritty plot outline. This is perhaps my least favorite part of planning, but I cannot overstate how important it is for crafting a coherent story. You should have, at the very least, a vague sense of how the story will go. I usually have the beginning and end semi-fleshed out— the middle is what I often wrestle with in the first draft.

Some people like to write a 20 page outline of plot events before they start drafting. Again, you should use whatever method floats your boat! Personally, I find that as I write, the plot often changes in unexpected ways, or I find inspiration for subplots that hadn’t even crossed my mind. To figure out how much plotting you’d like to do before writing, I recommend the Jericho Writer’s guide to plot outlining. There are many different methods you could use— it’s all about finding what works for you.

As I write, I like to keep track of my chapters in a table like this:

It’s a very bare-bones summary, but it helps me keep track of character perspective, plot events, and the purpose they serve in the larger story. Keeping it in a table also lets me easily remove rows if I end up cutting a specific chapter, or add rows if new chapters are written.

How much or how little you outline, and what method you use— these things are very much so up to you. All of the planning aspects should serve to help you write, so if you try something that feels more grueling than constructive, don’t feel bad about dropping it and trying something else!

If you get stuck on any of the planning facets, it may help to shift to another aspect for a while, or try some exploratory writing instead.

Photo by Hossein Fatemi on Unsplash

Here’s a brief summary of the three aspects of planning:

1. Worldbuilding – organizing the details of your setting to create a vivid and grounded environment for your story.

2. Character Creation – documenting the basics of each character’s life, appearance, motivation, and personality.

3. Plot Outlining – writing out the order of events within your story to get a sense of how they flow.

And here’s a list of challenge options for you this week. Pick any one that appeals to you! Remember to work on one thing at a time so the process stays fun and fresh.

1. Deepen the Worldbuilding

   1. Look at your setting and see what feels vague or undefined. Pick an aspect (like politics, religion, geography, etc.) and spend some time exploring it, with or without the use of a worldbuilding guide. Or, create a map (always fun— I recommend Inkarnate).

2. Flesh out a character

   1. Pick a character in your work that feels flat or unfinished, and spend 15-30 minutes creating a character outline for them. Dig deep into their motivations– what do they want? How do they feel about the events that take place in your story?

3. Structure the Plot

   1. If you haven’t started writing yet, create a plot outline using any method of your choosing (even just writing out a summary over a page or so). If you’ve already started writing, go back and write down a summary of what’s happened so far, or create a table to keep track of chapters/plot events. If doing this for the whole story feels overwhelming, you can do it for a smaller section, like the beginning.

I know this post contains a lot to think about while also simultaneously barely scratching the surface. Planning is an intensive process! I encourage you to spend more time exploring whatever aspects are giving you trouble, because the rubber hits the road next week in part 3 of BFI, How to Write. Hopefully, this week’s post helps you lay the foundation for the hard work of writing your first draft.

Happy planning, and I’ll see you next Sunday!

Allie

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