Sometimes It’s Better to Write Than to Plan

I’ve been writing professionally for over 40 years, but I learned more about crafting a novel in the past few years than I had previously. Why? Because I finally wrote one!

A vast majority of my earlier creative writing efforts went toward projects for which I researched factual information and then “made it my own” with different ways of saying things that had already been said… often many times. And that’s fine. We need factual information that’s communicated in creative ways.

But when you’re writing a novel, it’s a whole new ballgame. This week’s topic is planning versus writing. Or, as I’ve titled it, “Sometimes It’s Better to Write Than to Plan.”

Ordinarily, these two components – putting thought into planning your novel and writing it – would go hand in hand, with planning leading the way and writing following. But here’s what I discovered while writing the Bamboo Harvester soft science fiction novel series: other than some very basic planning I engaged in before I started writing, I found that trying to plan how a particular section or an individual chapter would go was an exercise in futility… at least for me.

Every time I tried to construct a segment or chapter by planning it, I would hit a wall. Usually pretty hard. While attempting to plan, I was constantly stumped regarding what I wanted characters to do and say, and how I wanted circumstances to play out.

But when I pushed planning to the side and just started writing, all of a sudden the floodgates opened and my fingers couldn’t keep up with what I was suddenly envisioning in my mind regarding the direction I wanted the scene to take. Each sentence I would write would spark an idea for the next sentence or the next paragraph or the next page.   

Please don’t ask me why this happens for me because I have no idea. Maybe it’s because I use a different part of my brain to write than I do to plan. If something like this would have occurred only once or just a few times, I would not be writing about this subject. The fact is, it happened over and over again. Other than big concepts, I just quit planning my novel altogether because it didn’t work for me. But writing did work – time after time.

Now, I don’t know if your mind works the same way mine does. If so, I feel sorry for you because sometimes I think my mind is kind of messed up. But even if it doesn’t, and even if you have much better success when you plan exactly where a plot line is headed before you start writing, maybe you can try this method when you have writer’s block. 

If your mind does happen to work like mine, I’d strongly encourage you to push the planning to the side and just start writing. You’ll find that you have to toss out some of what you’ve written, but you’ll also come up with some great stuff you will definitely want to keep. And better yet, while you’re writing, other ideas will pop into your head that you can use for other chapters. 

For me, digging into the minutiae of writing helps the creative juices flow, while stepping back and trying to plan the direction a scene will take dries up those juices.