What a Mess: Writing After Planning
Sometimes, I like to plan.
“Well, no s***, Sarah,” I hear some of you say. “You made intricate trails of themed and complex clues for fun! You have every book you own arranged in perfect order on your bookshelves! You used to create floorplans and down-to-5-minutes itineraries for your grade-school slumber parties!”
True. And the parties went nothing like according to schedule, and they were still fun. (1o-year-old me didn’t have the solidest concept of what you can actually get done in 15 minutes.) But even so, putting them together — writing down menus and time increments in firm block letters on a blank notebook page — was a different kind of fun in itself.
It’s the same pleasure as setting out all the ingredients on the counter-top, arranged with each utensil you will need, before baking the cake. It’s the joy of sorting your week into chunks time in which to do particular tasks. It’s writing down all the groceries you must buy and the errands you must run and the items you must pack even if you never consult any of those lists again.
There is a beauty to order. Sometimes, writing is about creating that aesthetic satisfaction: mapping out each chapter with a list of key plot points. Selecting character’s names, the first and last ones you’ll probably use and the middle ones you probably won’t. Making minor edits, like changing the term you have chosen for a particular fantasy concept and using CTRL+F to scour the document until you’re sure it’s consistent once more.
Turning to the cover page of a new notebook and writing in your name and working title.
Opening a fresh file and saving it as the name of your new work-in-progress in a folder you’ve just created for this project.
Striking keys and watching letters dance across your screen, your thoughts made visual. Spelling words just so, as contemporary English language demands. Inserting or deleting a character to fix a typo and watching the squiggly SOMETHING’S WRONG red and green underlining vanish. Inserting an Oxford comma.
Allowing the rare phrase or rarer scene that hatches whole to move through you until it’s there in words.
Typing your name, address, and word count on the title page.
Drawing the tip of your ballpoint pen across a fresh sheet of lined paper and leaving a trail of your thoughts in ink.
When I think of what I enjoy about writing, I tend to imagine these things. As a child, when given the opportunity to buy a “treat” at the dollar store, I ignored candy and dallied over toys, but nearly always, in the end, chose a brand new notebook. Each one seemed to hold the imaginative promise of a whole set of action figures or building blocks or modelling clay. Chocolate and gummies were, I knew, a fleeting pleasure; starting a new story, a new notebook, was a joy with longevity.
However, it was not the same kind of joy throughout. I’ve completed 11 novel manuscripts to date. Guess how many “first notebooks” I’ve started?
(Hint: if you’re only tripling that, you’re way too low.)
Because, no matter how nice and neat the notebook is when I start it, how deliberately I inscribe each word, how vivid and clear the scene I have in my imagination, I inevitably mess up.
I write a stupid phrase and have to cross it out. I decide I hate the title and need to change it. I leave the first three sentences for a couple weeks and then when I come back to them, I can’t start cold in the middle of a paragraph.
I decide this isn’t the story I want to tell or the character I want to follow or the scene I need to start.
The beauty of order is the beauty of possibility: there are thousands of ways to make a mess but only one way to tidy up. Anything even slightly out of place — a scratched-out word, a torn page, one of a million little divots in perfection — limits those possibilities.
The joy of possibility, for a writer, is an overwhelming wave of excitement. Before the story or article or book is on paper, in words, it can never be less than the feelings its creator has about it. It’s a million things at once. It’s every brilliance.
But once it actually has to be inscribed in the real world, it loses its flawlessness. The plan, so elegant and fluid as a summary, stumbles when you have to figure out exactly what your characters are doing and why each second of the scene. Writing is a messy hobby, and it can be tempting to write beginnings only: a dozen new notebooks full of promise.
I have drawers full of beginnings arrested in the honeymoon phase — my cousins and me find a mysterious scroll in the forest the same day our uncle brings a sinister stranger to the cottage, two siblings and their friends find themselves in a magical land, hoodlums half-transformed into beasts surround our 19th-century heroine still on the streets after dusk. So much fun to get down on a blank sheet of paper! So difficult to continue once the orderly magic wears off!
To finish a story, I have to work past that initial enthusiasm. I have to abandon the easy joy of the organized, the possibility, the hypothetical perfection, and allow myself to accept the mess: scenes that directly contradict the scenes that came before. Whole pages crossed out. Comments telling myself to completely change what I just wrote.
I have to dig in dirty and trust that when the dust clears, I’ll be able to tidy everything up again. That’s the only way to make something new.
There’s a place and time for planning. It’s great. But life is messy — teams find ways around cracking a cipher, books get taken out to read, and friends don’t put their sleeping bags in the assigned living-room slots. And, like anything else, writing is part of life.