The Only Plan

When it comes to how they find and tell their stories, the great, diverse community of writers–from fiction to non-fiction, from romance to literary–are divided into three categories: those who outline every chapter, those who do not outline at all, and those who outline just enough to get started. I’ve joined the latter category, though only because my publisher requires it of me. Left to my own devices, I’d just wing it.

Writers who don’t outline at all are often called “pantsers,” meaning they find the story by the seat of their pants. It’s the rare pantser who doesn’t feel a little guilty about their process. It seems lazy and unprofessional. An outliner knows what they’re doing and where they’re going. It’s a very grown-up way to write, a captainish way to write. Pantsers often claim they’re going to try outlining their next book. I know they won’t, or that if they try, it won’t go well. If you can happily write one book without at outline, the plans you try to make for your story will feel wooden and artificial.

I’ve been writing stories without a plan for a very long time. Or rather, I have written with only one plan: for the stories to end in peace rather than war, in love rather than fear, in forgiveness rather than judgment. That’s where they’re all headed because that’s where I want to live. Having the ending in mind, however abstract, simplifies the process greatly.

For many years, while I wrote all these stories without a plan, I would try to plan my life. Or at least I wanted to have a plan beyond: write stories and sell them. It seemed like the grown-up thing to do. I was a grown-up, after all. I had kids and a wife and a mortgage. Without some kind of plan, who knows what I’d do with my time. Like those pantsers, I considered myself a bit lazy. I was forever dreaming of the day when I’d be free of obligations, all those things I had to do that ate up the time I could spend doing what I wanted to do. Adults, after all, did what needed to be done, and kids did what they wanted.

The problem with all the plans I made was that they never worked out. I’d always lose interest in them when something better came along, something I hadn’t planned, something I couldn’t have planned. I’d follow that new idea until I’d reached its conclusion, and then I’d think to myself, “Okay, that’s done. What should I do now? I need a plan!” And I’d repeat the process all over again, always feeling a little lazy, always believing the next plan would be the one I’d follow.

Until I looked up one day and realized all my plans amounted to nothing more than me trying to fool myself into predicting the future. I had to admit they were a futile and, in many ways, anxiety-inducing exercise. They were supposed to calm me, give me some sense of direction, when in truth I could feel the flimsy material of which they were constructed, could sense they would collapse under the weight of actual lived experiences.

On the other hand, when an idea came to me that looked interesting, and when I followed it only because I was interested to learn where it would take me, I always knew my footing was sure. What’s more, these interesting ideas always led me somewhere I wanted to be, someplace both profitable and fun. You’d think, given the contrasting experiences of planning and inspiration, it would be easy to give up on the former. It wasn’t. It felt too much like relinquishing control. I wanted to be a kind of boss who could order up an idea from his employees.

When I interviewed Nick Bantock, artist and author of the bestselling Griffin and Sabine books, he explained that he’d learned that he wasn’t the one in control of his creative process, that he was instead the one “served the master.” I had to agree with him, though to accept my role as servant rather than master means trusting that whatever I’m serving wants the same thing I do: peace, love, and forgiveness. As it happens, without trust there is no peace, there is no love, and there certainly is no forgiveness. Trust is the open door through which everything valuable in my life has ever flowed, is my first and only necessary step in all the plans life has for me.

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This post is republished on Medium.

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