Clearing The Runway So The Plan Can Take Off

A neat desk and a clean(er) office.

I’ve been in that “too busy to stay organized” trap for a couple of months. As I’ve been creatively transitioning from Pilgrimage to Walk Like A Stranger: Passing Through Home in the last few weeks, the clutter and dust and chaos started to bring me down. I found it difficult to work in my office and think productively at my desk.

So I spent some time on Sunday shredding paper, dusting shelves, breaking down boxes, filing, and the like.

And now that the physical clutter is cleared, the environment is much more conducive to playing with this:

Fifty two cards for fifty two installments

That’s the fifty two beat cards — which will approximately translate to fifty two weekly installments — of my upcoming serial fiction-by-subscription offering, Walk Like A Stranger: Passing Through Home, taped to two of my office closet doors.

That Looks Like Some Kind Of Plan

Yep! I’m a planner. I work out every beat of my stories before I type a single word of manuscript. What you see above is four acts of 13 beats each, with nine essential milestone beats exactly where they need to be, plus a few key beats in the final act.

Walk Like A Stranger: Passing Through Home will, hopefully, continue indefinitely. At the very least, though, the first arc will consist of fifty two parts. I’d be a fool to just start writing and hope that everything ends up fitting into fifty two roughly thousand-word pieces. Even if I did manage to pull that off, the end result would fall far short of the level of quality I could achieve planning the whole thing ahead of time.

And this principle doesn’t just apply to constrained things like a serial. I think pre-planning a story — working out every beat and every scene from beginning to end, sketching the mosaic before a single piece of glass is cut, and following the tried-and-true patterns found in nearly every powerful work of Western fiction — is the most effective and efficient way to craft the best possible fiction one can create.

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Writers, that’s your cue to fill the comments with your diatribes on the eternal planner v. pantser debate.

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Actually, I’m kidding. Because it’s not a question of whether you create your best possible story by detailed, thoughtful planning before you type the first letter of your manuscript, or if you create it through an iterative, torturous progression of multiple edited and re-written drafts. If your story fires on all cylinders, chances are it has those same nine essential milestones I’ve placed on my closet doors.

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And that’s your cue to debate the validity of deliberately adhering to story structure when creating fiction..!

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Actually, it doesn’t matter if you think it’s a valid strategy or a stifling constraint. Again, if your story is a good one, you’re gonna hit those marks whether you deliberately plan it or not. But you’ll get there so much faster if you do!

Anyway.

My office is clean. The runway is clear of obstruction, and the guideposts… fifty two unlined index and nine milestone markers… are in place. Time to fly!

Postscript On Story Structure

Want to learn more about the nigh-immutable laws of story structure? A great breakdown can be found in “Story Engineering” by Larry Brooks. While I’ve been aware of these principles for years, I’d never effectively executed on them until I read this book. Highly recommended.

This is a post from Matthew Wayne Selznick. Thanks for reading Clearing The Runway So The Plan Can Take Off -- please click through and comment, and share with everyone you know!