Last July, I re-read David Allen’s book Getting Things Done. I hoped it would help me get a handle on my mountain of conflicting tasks and priorities—between moving, child care, and overlapping deadlines I was slipping downhill. Getting Things Done (often abbreviated as GTD) is, for my money, one of the all-time great books in the business / productivity / “capitalist, wash your face” genre. It’s a guide to ‘productivity’ that’s really more of a guide-to-not-feeling-constantly-crushed-by-the-weight-of-everything-you-have-to-do. Books like that have an aspirational edge, and I figured it would at least make me feel that forward motion was possible, that things, or I, could improve. I did not expect to leave the book with a new perspective on planning and outlining in fiction.
I read the new edition, which came out about four years ago, and loved it. The first edition is also great, but it was written as a Business Book in the late 90s / early double-oughts, targeted at management types, and reads that way. The system Allen proposes doesn’t require an admin assistant or secretary—in fact it involves the reader taking direct responsibility for her own calendar, agenda, and so forth away from any admin assistants who may be in the picture—but it talks as if it’s reasonable to assume that there’s an admin assistant around somewhere. The old edition also discusses some specific, now dated, technologies—palm pilots and things like that. The new edition makes fewer assumptions about the reader’s profession and background, and fewer references to technology, observing (correctly) that technology is in flux, and the specifics of apps and the like matter less than the sound principles of the system.
My fencing teacher always used to say “smooth is faster than fast.” The goal of Allen’s system is to get you to smooth. The core of the system is to write down everything you want to do, identify concrete next actions toward achieving those goals, write those actions down in an organized way in a trusted place, and refer to that place regularly—so you’re not leaning on your memory or reacting to the contents of your inbox. I remembered the general outlines of his system from the last time I read the book, but I didn’t remember his approach to project planning, and I’d never connected it with the work of outlining.
Planning and outlining are topics writers start comment thread wars over. Everyone writes differently. The process of writing is the process of thinking, with an outlet and a legible record. Learning to write is learning, slowly, to navigate our own minds—and the great shared confusing dream we call ‘culture,’ diversely enfleshed in each of us. But writing for readers adds additional layers of complexity. There’s the dream of artistic success, of someday giving someone a book that they love like we love the books we love. And, you know, it’s nice, if we can, to get money for the work, since getting money for doing something in our culture helps us carve out the space to do that thing again, or do something different but also cool.
Since writing is so private and yet the stakes of writing are potentially so public, it’s easy, in those long solitary months, to get a sense that you are Doing it Wrong, or, if you have a differently-bent personality, to become convinced that you and you alone are Doing it Right. The terrifying truth of the situation is that there is no single right answer, that minds are complex and reach the page by complex processes, that masterpieces have been written using every compositional and organizing technique under the sun. What works for thee may not for me.
That magnifies anxiety about methods—even among people who really do know what they’re doing, and even among people not natively anxiety-prone. There are whole industries—profitable ones! more profitable, I suspect, than actual publishing!—built around selling into that anxiety, offering credentials, tricks, access to experienced guides, cohorts and communities. That anxiety leads even masters liable to form ritual dependencies on any process they’ve found helpful once—like a baseball player who won’t wash their lucky home-run underwear. Writers can also manage anxiety through orthodoxies and claimed identities. ALL WRITERS must OUTLINE! ALL WRITERS must WRITE EVERY DAY! You are EITHER a PANTSER or a PLOTTER!
“Pantser” in this jargon means someone who writes by the seat of their pants. “Plotter” means someone who plans out what they’re about to write, then writes it. That is, someone who outlines. There are different articulations of these two basic concepts—George RR Martin prefers to draw lines between “Gardeners,” who plant seeds and tend as the story grows, and “Architects,” who plan the whole thing out meticulously because, well, once you’ve poured a few hundred tons of concrete it’s hard to decide you’re going to take a different approach—but the tension between planning and evolution comes up again and again. Chan Buddhists in the Song dynasty had a factional conflict between “suddentist” and “gradualist” modes of enlightenment that fell along similar lines.
Now, pantsing and plotting are often presented, unhelpfully, as either-or methods, as contradictory, as in fact, defined by negation: a plotter is anyone who doesn’t fly by the seat of their pants. A pantser (which autocorrect really wants to be panther) is anyone who does not plan. But… what does not planning look like? Sure, in some moments lightning strikes, you channel raw power down into the page—but you’re still there, channeling that power, deciding what word goes next, balancing it against your expectations for the book and what has come so far. Those spontaneous moments, when you know exactly what happens next, down to the word: well, you know, don’t you? Isn’t that a sort of plan, even if unwritten? Even if it assembled itself from the air, sudden as a snowflake? On the flip side: if you don’t fly by the seat of your pants, if you don’t just put things down on a piece of paper to see what they look like when they’re there, if you don’t leap into the unknown at some point… where does the plan come from? Something does, at some point, just occur to you. These are not in fact contradictory approaches. They’re approaches in tension with one another. I’m less interested in pantsing or plotting than I am in approaches that understand this tension, and find new ways to navigate it.
David Allen doesn’t talk about writing fiction in Getting Things Done, but he does talk about planning complex projects—projects that take more than one concrete action to complete. He describes what he calls the “Natural Planning” process:
Identify Goals / Principles
Envision Outcome
Brainstorm
Organize
Next Actions
You start by asking what general principles govern the project—what are your ethics, priorities, concerns, objectives. If you’re planning a birthday party for a friend, what sort of party is it? How do you want your friend to feel? What general rules inform your planning (no alcohol, no exes, must include at least one rabbit, gluten free cake, the more ice cream the better)? From there, you can envision a specific party, with a specific outcome (Rabbit cafe! Gelato mountain!). At that point you brainstorm everything that might be involved in making that vision come true (Is there such a thing as a rabbit cafe, really? Can I get to one? Who, if anyone, makes good gelato around here?). Then, after expansive brainstorming, you organize those thoughts into general categories of action, things that need to be done next. Then you ask yourself, what is the next concrete thing to be done.
What’s missing here: a comprehensive road map of the entire project from beginning to end. It’s missing because once you understand your goals, your principles, once you have a specific outcome in mind, and you’ve brainstormed comprehensively and organized your thoughts, you only need to focus on one concrete next action at a time. And what’s more, you only really can focus on one concrete next action at a time.
Life has a way of confounding plans. You wanted to pan-roast some chicken thighs tonight but last night in a moment of inattention you left the chicken thighs on the refrigerator shelf where things take three times as long to defrost. The person who was supposed to pick up a package for you, got a flat tire. You planned to go to New Zealand this summer but circumstances intervened. Or a happy coincidence strikes: you thought you were out of gas, but it turns out the gas gauge was just stuck. You thought you had another mile to walk, but there, suddenly, is the trailhead.
Fictional reality can surprise us as much as the physical variety. A character we thought would be funny turns out to be sad. The sinister villain has a heart of gold. A beloved character dies, all of a sudden and for no reason. Micro-decisions we make subconsciously on the level of word choice add up to huge tides of tone and affect that reshape the project beneath us. The comic relief character becomes the hero. Fated lovers split up. If we have a plan, it has to change. If we didn’t have a plan, we may find ourselves even more lost than we thought we were.
That’s why I think this planning model has so many interesting applications to writing. Once we know the general shape of the project (it has to be a hundred and twenty thousand words, it will be an epic fantasy, this is how I want people to feel when they read it), and we’ve organized those impressions into broad strokes of action and characterization—what matters is what specific thing we do next, and the thing after that. So then we write the next scene, and write it to find out what happens. We may expect, or suspect, what comes next, but we don’t know. Beyond that the future—which we discover as we do the next thing, and the next.
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Speaking of what’s next! This weekend is 4th Street Fantasy, one of my favorite literary conventions—in new Virtual flavor. 4th Street is a convention for high-level conversations about fantasy, fantasy literature, and writing craft, and usually it’s limited to the 140 or so people who can fit into a single ballroom in Minneapolis in June. This weekend, due to, you know, everything, we’ve made 4th Street virtual, and, through the magic of the internet, limitless. Comment live on panels via text! Have a live text Q&A! We’re also experimenting with new online-format-only items, like a session held in World of Warcraft and hosted by C.L. Polk. The virtual event is pay-what-you-can with a suggested donation of $20, which also makes this a great way to see what 4th Street is all about. Register here, and I’ll see you there.
This a great discussion of pantsing (panthering?), plotting, and everything in between :) I've waxed poetic enough about Twine that I worry about overselling it, and it is a method that works very well for *me*, particularly, not for everyone. But I do think that some sort of visualization helps really well with precisely the process you've described -- some notion of the general outline of your goals, your brainstorms, and some hint at unfilled spaces.
That last part is particularly important to me, as a writer and anxious person! One very specific example: in the game I'm writing now, I feel I've written an awesome intro, where the PC gets a glimpse at the Mystery. The Mystery, I've decided (back in Brainstorming phase), is going to lead the PC into a dungeon. But I have had trouble connecting the two. The transition did not occur naturally to me. With a visualization like Twine, I felt more comfortable creating (a virtual, but still very real) space for that missing transition, a placeholder link that fit nicely into the structure even if it (yet) had no content. When, much later, the transition occurred to me, I had the immense satisfaction of fitting it, puzzle-piece style, into the placeholder. The whole process was a big milestone for me: I felt for the first time like I could let go of the perfection of every beat of the story, in the linear process of writing it, and trust that a good enough beat would come later. I am not sure if there is explicit support for these kinds of leaps of faith in GTD, as you say, it's not a book on writing, but it does feel very much relevant to the topic of your post!