Plan Something, Then Plan to Plan Again

When life ruins Plan A, make your peace with Plan B; all great stories have plot twists, including your writing adventure.

In the spirit of doing something today that my future self will thank me for, I will spend every day in November figuring out the non-fiction book I want to write by piecing my way through core ideas on this blog. Instead of writing 50,000 words of a new novel for NaNoWriMo, I’ll be knocking out the word count here for NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month).

This is Plan B. It’s very much not Plan A.

I want to tell you about why I’m resorting to Plan B because it’s important to acknowledge that sometimes life gets life-y, and when life gets life-y, it can knock Plan A right off the planet. That’s what happened to me. Plan A’s are fragile. They get knocked around and shatter easily, but that doesn’t have to be a disaster.

Fortunately, every story has plot turns, every great story has curve balls to turn the plots, and the most memorable characters in any story have to figure out how to change their plans to get what they need.

Now that I have cleverly put myself in the category of most memorable characters, let’s talk about changing plans.

Plan A was to write the non-fiction book as a parallel project for NaNoWriMo.

I looked at my calendar to check travel and family obligations and calculated how many words a day I need to write on the days I can write, and came up with 2,000 words per day. It’s always 2,000 for me. It doesn’t matter whether I’m traveling, hosting Thanksgiving, staying home, or Door Dashing all my meals, somehow five of my November days get spoken for before I get to October.

Although it’s been a few years, I do have experience ghostwriting non-fiction books for clients, and if anyone knows what it takes to get the material out of a person’s head and onto the page, it’s me. I also happen to know what to say to the voices in said head that whisper evil little nasties like no one’s going to want to read about this, everyone’s going to see what a fake and a fraud you are, and who do you think you are, writing about something like this?  

Above all, I know the key to writing non-fiction is to organize material before you start. Plan A was to spend October getting the material out of my head and onto a page where I could take a good, hard look at it, address my doubts and fears with logic and reason, and then organize an easy-to-follow, step-by-step outline.

Like I said, I’ve done it before. I knew what it would take. I was ready. I had the pens. I had the notebook. I had the graph paper and the ruler. Planning non-fiction books is a tactile, pleasurable, purr-inducing process for me. I do it all by hand first, then transfer the information into the digital world once it’s more data than idea.

For this book and this November, developing the outline in a playground of colored pens and clean, crisp, virginal paper was to be the Do Something Today Your Future Self Will Thank You For.

Alas, like I also said, life got life-y. I got hit by a few curve balls and then people in my family got hit with their own curve balls, which then ricocheted into me, and whamo! Plan A teetered on the edge of the desk for a moment, before giving way to gravity in a spectacular death swoon of untapped potential and pure white feathers and smashed into a million billion pieces on the floor.

Life.

Shrug.

It goes on. October began on a Saturday, went sideways on a Wednesday, and the next day it was Monday and I had to ask how the hell it was Halloween already (the day before NaNoWriMo starts) and then hurry up and turn off all the lights in the front of the house because I didn’t even think once about getting candy for trick-or-treaters.

Somewhere around midnight, I made a decision. Just so I could get some sleep. I let go of the guilt and shame and fear and fault I found with myself for not doing my Plan A, and turned my mind to shaping a Plan B.

A few months ago, I had tossed around the idea of doing blog posts or a collection of short stories in lieu of NaNoWriMo, but I didn’t want to start yet another project that could sidetrack me from an existing WIP. I categorize this non-fiction book as a WIP, even though no tangible progress has been made on it, because I committed to writing it with other people, so it counts as something that needs to get done.

As soon as I turned my mind to shaping a Plan B, which involved physically turning over on the pillow, as it must, I freed myself from the sense of failure over Plan A. That made room for a nice little feeling of happiness over the way I prioritized the people in my life who needed my time and attention in October. I failed at preparing a book outline, but I won at being the kind of mother and daughter and grandmother I want to be.

I also need to win at being a writer, though, or I don’t feel like I’m doing well in life at all. Winning at being a writer, for me, is about accepting that sometimes things need to happen in their own time, in their own way.

Plan B is about using November as a tool as well as a word count challenge. Rather than producing 50,000 words in an orderly fashion – which I don’t feel ready for – I’m giving myself the opportunity to flesh out different ideas and topics, about 1,000 words at a time, twice a day, for 25 of the 30 days of November.

I’ll still end up with 50,000 words of a new book. As well as having experience writing non-fiction books, I also have experience winning NaNoWriMo. I know that Plan A would have landed me where Plan B will land me, with a bunch of raw copy to cobble together, organize, revise, rewrite, and edit.

That collection of raw copy will be the something I do in November that my January self will thank me for as I sit down to write the book proposal.

Here’s the thing, though. If Plan B works out, I will be ecstatic. Often, though, life pushes us to compromise further into a Plan C—which is fine, as long as the plan continues to honor the essence of the goal. In my case, figuring out what goes into this non-fiction book is the essence of my goal. As long as Plan C delivers on that promise to myself, it’s doing its job.

But if I can’t make Plan C work, I have to do what I tell my clients they have to do when it happens to them: Go straight to Plan D.

Plan D is always Ask For Help.

Your future self will thank you for it.