The whoosh of a collapsing plan - by Rowena House

To paraphrase Douglas Adams, I love making plans. I like the whooshing sound they make as they collapse.

His original quote was about deadlines flying past. But having watched Master Blasters on TV years ago, I'm going to say edifices collapse with a whoosh as well, and a satisfying mushroom of dust, leaving a pile of rubble from which to start building again if that’s what takes your fancy.

The plan thus demolished?

That having finished draft one of the seventeenth-century witch trial work-in-progress back in April, I would power into the development edit on retreat in June and finish it in time for an historical writing course at Moniack Mhor in November.

However. 

A series of well-placed detonators went off in the real world, starting in May, and reverberating until now, leaving me surrounded by rubble, wondering if I’ll be able to pick up a trowel again before November.

Which is fine. My sort-of deadline for this story is end-September next year, and since I don’t have writing plans after that, there’s no pressure to finish this manuscript early.

Where, therefore, is the WIP in its fragmented state of becoming a story?

The A-plot is undergoing a thorough development edit to bring out its protagonist’s character arc as it evolved during the drafting. Before the latest detonation, this edit had reached the midpoint of Act 2 part 1, with the outline of further structural revisions tucked away safety in various synopses. So I should be able to pick up these pieces as soon as time allows.

The development edit must also integrate an entirely new B-plot into the A-plot. I’d planned to draft this B-plot before plaiting the two together, but in practice I found myself writing both in tandem – in alternating chapters – so I’ll carry on with that when I can. Meanwhile, I’m hoping the ‘backroom girls’ of my creative unconscious are already working out how to dovetail their dual denouements.

The shape of this ending is mostly being driven by the internal logic of each plotline, but external drivers are in the mix, too. 

For example, back in September, at another super-productive writing retreat at Chez Castillon [pic below], our leader, author and writing tutor Rowan Coleman, recommended the A- and B-plot protagonists have a closer relationship than the one I have plotted. She wondered about a romance between them – as had the tutor at the June retreat – an option I don't think is plausible in the world I've created for them. 

In two previous iterations of a female protagonist for the B-plot, both women were in a significant relationship with the A-plot hero, Tom. However, neither the role of lover nor surrogate mother suits the current B-plot heroine, Alys.

On the other hand, Tom's story would benefit from a more dramatic Q-factor to catalyse the final battle. So that is the specific story problem I have set the BR girls: how can Alys trigger Tom’s climax action during a face-to-face meeting?

For those not a fan of plotting via story beats, the Q-factor is – from memory – James Scott Bell’s term for the beat where a character or event that happens early in the story enables a critical action later on. It’s named after Q in the Bond films, the character who gives James Bond a gadget which will save the day.

Away from such structural plotting, the contours of Alys’s character arc are also growing in the cracks and dusty corners left in the rubble of my plan.

Earlier this month, for instance, the BR girls suggested a more relatable emotional wound than the one I had plotted, resulting in more poignant psychological scar and consequent immoral action. Perhaps her confession/self-revelation about her wound might factor into Tom’s Q-factor scene. Who knows.

Meanwhile, a separate suggestion arrived from the backroom last weekend. Since Tom’s story is at its core about a conformist who learns to think for himself, perhaps Alys’s story should - at heart - be about an outsider who chooses to come in from the cold.

Perhaps her self-revelation about her wound is what decides her to end her self-imposed exile, and finally meet with Tom. Hmm...

However it happens, the need for this significant meeting between Tom and Alys was reinforced last weekend by another serendipitous event. 

The leader of the Moniack Mhor historical fiction writing course in November is the author Andrew Miller. I adore his Costa prize-winning Pure and find his blogs and interviews about his approach to writing fascinating. So, for National Bookshop Day, I bought his 2025 Booker Prize short-listed novel The Land in Winter and read it over the past two weekends.

Now it’s finished, I don’t know what to think about it. Atmospheric, yes. Beautifully written in parts. But it's not my kind of book. Wrong era, wrong characters. It happens. But [spoiler alert] right at the end, all four point-of-view characters meet.

I'm not into signs, but this was a sign, right? Tom and Alys must meet. I just hope the BR girls are onto the case. 

 

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Plan the book, write the plan – by Rowena House

Plan the book, write the plan. That’s the simplistic advice I gave myself two years ago during a twelve-day intensive writing retreat, at the end of which I announced here on ABBA that writing the seventeenth century witch trial work-in-progress had finally begun.

On 6/9/2022 to be precise.

Hurrah! Two years is not so very shameful for writing half a (semi-edited) manuscript.

True, the story has been in the pipeline for more than ten years. Serious research and planning began in 2020. But with life brimming over with other demands, my inner ‘hero’ storyteller can claim it’s all going swimmingly, thank you very much.

However...

Was it good advice, that stuff about the plan? Will it help me over the finish line when I’ve ‘only’ got two more years of the PhD to go, with a thesis to write as well 40K more creative words to draft and edit?

In short, where is the WIP at this sort-of half-way point? 

                                            Chez Castillon writer's retreat

Well, today ‘the plan’ looks nothing like it did in September 2022. Back then, two female characters loomed large in a story centred on a male protagonist. Now, while both women are still important, they are reduced to walk-on parts. This is a shame from a feminist standpoint, but necessary as the focus of the story shifted in the telling, and its core became clearer.

And that's just fine thanks primarily to advice from Hisham Matar and George Saunders. They helped me losen up to such an extent I’d now say I’m a card-carrying member of the Forget Self-imposed Creative Constraints Party. The plan should be fluid. If anything’s not working, jettison it! Create something better. More original. More precise.

That’s not the same as 'let rip' drafting, which lots of writers I admire subscribe to. Maybe you could say at this half-way point I'm at a half-way house between plotting and panstering. Yes, I'll follow the story deep into its wood but also remember what a path looks like. Otherwise it’s not a journey, it’s just getting lost.

What hasn't changed is my reliance on synopsis-based plans informed by the likes of Truby, Storr, and Scott Bell. They are still my go-to gurus when things fall apart. Paradoxically, however, I've found these storytelling ‘systems’ work best when you use them flexibly. Picking and mixing. Accepting much of the advice is contradictory, even at times misleading.

The important thing to remember is that planning is good practice, even when any one plan goes spectacularly wrong. Plans are adaptable to evolving content; they’re tools, not straight-jackets.

Another lesson I’ll flag up to myself at the half-way stage is this: as the opportunity to write recedes to the end of the month, a full six weeks after I had to stop writing this summer, trust that you will get back to it. The story will be in stasis, or even subconsciously developing during these inevitable downtimes. Over the past four years, life has derailed me repeatedly. Each time it has taken at least a week to regain a creative frame of mind and pick up the pieces again. That’s just how it is.

Since 2022, I’ve also found I wrote the largest number of new words during intensive bouts of working, primarily on retreats but also during the adapted NaNoWriMo I did last year. These new words were, however, almost entirely misdirected and got jettisoned within weeks.

But that is fine, too. The old adage ‘get it writ then get it right’ applies to acts, chapters and scenes - whatever chunk of text you’re writing. Thus it is possible – perhaps necessary – to be a panster and a plotter at the same time. The plan will stop rubbish words from dragging the whole thing down. 

Finally - and this after reading a truly irritating ‘dialogue’ between Richard Osman and Lee Child in The Guardian today -  I will add one last thought before signing off.

Dwelling on the inequalities of the publishing industry is wasted time. Damn celebrities. Writing this story is a learning process at so many levels: creative, psychological, political. In the end, learning will keep you saner than not learning, even in our crazy world.

Enjoy the beginnings of autumn if you’re in the northern hemisphere. See you on the other side of the equinox. 

                                             More Chez Castillon. Lovely!

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On sandcastles and synopses - Rowena House

I love iteration, its back-and-forth, revisiting and refining ideas. It is the antidote to linear, post-fact rationalisation and a challenge to dogma, harnessing the fluid relationships between that and this, there and here, then and now.

Hilary Mantel’s posthumous A Memoir of My Former Self apparently traces some of the iterations in her thoughts, according to The Guardian’s review this weekend. * 

"We repeatedly see Mantel testing and circling ideas, developing her thoughts over time," says reviewer John Self,

I'd love her to have narrated the audiobook so we can hear her wry intelligence again.

Revisiting these ABBA posts has become a conscious part of my creative process as I refine the plot plan for the 17th century witch trial work-in-progress. From the rather scary place it's at – starting the first draft of Act II – I can see different uses for some of the plotting devices I’ve experimented with before.

For instance, the guru-inspired template synopses I generated last year (and blogged about here over several months) have now taken on new roles. At the outset, they were story development devices. ‘What ifs.’ With hindsight, the output of that process – distilled into roughly four discrete synopses for the whole manuscript – look more like glimpses into alternative futures, possibilities of the shape of things to come.

This shift in viewpoint – from ‘that then’ to ‘this now’ – put me in mind of a writing axiom that’s always sounded good in theory but which I’ve never been able to put into practice.

It is the notion that a first draft is a sand pit into which you pour your ideas, and only afterwards shape the sand into the castles of your story. It is a variation on ‘get it writ, then get it right’ (which, like iteration, I remember talking about here before).

The template outlines can, perhaps, be seen as half-way houses. Or half-way castles. Buckets filled with similar characters and events, each producing a different shaped story. Historical Crime is one shape, Literary Thriller another, and so forth.

Each synopsis poses a question: which genre, if any, best fits the characters and events of this tale, and is that type of story one I genuinely want to devote the time and energy needed to write it?

In the spontaneous moment when fingers hit keys, I don't think big questions like genre should matter. If they did, I doubt anything would get written at all. But outside that moment, after a break, wondering where the story got to and where it’s going next, a sand castle in a bucket turns out to be helpful.

You can pick it up and see what you like. What’s missing. What would be fun to do with it now. What doesn’t make sense any more.

For future reference – if there is ever going to be another story – template outlines have definitely earned their place in my writing tool kit.

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*I'll try to remember to put a link into the comments once I've found it! It was published on Saturday, 14 October 2023.

Is This the Perfect Planning Tool? by Claire Fayers

 I came across a curious little story-planning tool whilst randomly web-browsing the other day.

It's called Twine, a free, open-source app for non-linear stories, and there are desktop and online versions, which you can find here

It's a very simple planning tool but what I love about it is you can set up different pathways for your story. Great if you're an indecisive semi-pantster like me. 

Here's how it works. 

Open the application and select 'new'. A box will appear ready and waiting for you to fill in the details of your starting scene.

Then, link to the next scene by means of a double bracket. [[Next scene]]

Not sure you want the story to go there? No problem, you can set up an alternative path.

Keep linking scenes together until you've mapped out all the possibilities for you story.

Once you're done, you can test the various versions of your stories by selecting any scene and clicking 'test from here' at the top of the page. A window will appear with a text version of you story which reads a bit like a choose your own adventure.

You can delete scenes, change your starting point, and drag things around on the screen. A very useful feature is the ability to tag scenes with different colours - great for brainstorming or for marking out your finished plan.

You can export the finished story, but only as a html file so I think this is a tool best used at the planning stage when you have a multitude of ideas in your head. It would be a fantastic tool for plotting choose-your-own type stories.

I'm going to play around with it some more. If you give it a go, let me know what you think.

Claire Fayers www.clairefayers.com

Groundhog Day – with a machete – by Rowena House

This month I restarted the WIP after an enforced break of three months, so this post will honour the spirit of last month’s about the (happily) narrated self by recounting all the useful things that came out of that creative void, while consigning the bits that sucked to forgetfulness.

Good thing, the first: re-reading the first 10K words with fresh eyes.

After three years researching, planning, and drafting, and many more mulling the possibilities of the story, the opening works. MEGA hurrah. We have a solid launch pad in terms of voice, form, and content which, after seemingly endless tinkering, rewriting, and starting again, is progress – and journalist me can stop that eye rolling right now, thank you very much.

Good thing, the second: the main character ‘exists’ outside the specifics of the plot.

Last year’s intensive planning of scenes and sequences driven by the main character’s neuroses have delivered a sufficiently robust outline that it can withstand change. I.e., the emotional and psychological drivers of the story can take the plot wherever it needs to go. Ta, especially, to Story Geek guru Jeff Lyons for that – though, please, Jeff, drop the enneagrams.

Good thing, the third. Darlings to kill? Hand me the machete, mwa-ha-ha. They’re just so 2022. 

Pic: Staples Inn, from C17th witch trial work in progress

Good thing, the fourth. Intuition rules.

For example, certain decisions have been taken without a conscious process. The ‘real’ ghost character, for instance, is gone. Just like that. She’s not my problem any more, just the protagonist’s, and I understand why he believes in her and feel for him. She is as real to him as he is real for me. Like Angelique from The Goose Road is real. Crazy, huh? But true.

Meanwhile, other plot problems have stepped out of the shadows and said, Solve me. Now. Specifically, the kick into Act 2. No matter which way I twisted it, the main character – the person I know – could not step in any self-propelled way into the new world, whatever the rulebook says.

Fair enough, then. Find another route. The antagonist will just have to kick him there instead. And guess what? The story works better for it! Cue more eye rolling, like you didn’t know rules are there to break.

Good thing, the fifth. Some of the stuff that came out of the memory locker makes more sense than what went in last year.

An example. A lot of 2021 (yup, that’s not a typo) was spent – don’t say wasted, this is happy narrative self here – fretting over how to align form, content, and voice. Actually, now I write that I realize it’s not true. I didn’t think of them as a unit. Instead, my experiments with voice were separated conceptually from experiments with form (first person, third, retrospective and framing devices etc) and content (the events to be recounted and the specifics of scenes).

In other words, the what-to-write content, the how-to-put-the-manuscript-together form, and the tone/voice/style of the words had seemed to be different problems.

Now that the opening is finally singing, it’s clear they were harmonies in the same tune. Pieces of a single puzzle. A set of problems only solvable together. [Yeah, yeah. Duh, right? It’s been a tough three months. Anyhow…] Eureka! John Truby’s designing principle pops out of the memory locker as a great planning tool, not just another trick to storytelling I didn’t get.

Here’s what Truby says about the designing principle in The Anatomy of Story: “[it] is abstract; it is the deeper process going on in the story, told in an original way…

“Let’s say you are a writer who wants to show the intimate workings of the Mafia in America, as literally hundreds of screenwriters and novelists have done. If you were really good, you might come up with this designing principle (for The Godfather):

“Use the classic fairy-tale strategy of showing how the youngest of three sons becomes the new ‘king’.”

Yeah, okay, I get it now. Having read the book three times!

To be honest, sifting through all this stuff after a break feels like Groundhog Day, with the half-forgotten only strangely familiar. The slow dawn of recognition is embarrassing. Perhaps our creative selves can get lost in a dark faerie realm where months pass like years. If so, thank goodness for signposts like Truby’s on the route to escape.

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A chart-maker’s tale – by Rowena House

According to the ABBA blog counter, this article seems to be my seventieth on this site. Almost enough words to turn into a book! A vanity project masquerading as a chronicle of real-world (and, originally, as near as possible real-time) dispatches from the creative writing front. It would take a lot of editing, but maybe one day, Meanwhile, thank you to ABBA for being an enduring writerly space.

Over the years I’ve learned enormous amounts from fellow contributors about the ups and downs of a writing life, about books and writers I’d never heard of, about pitfalls of our trade, and listened in on important debates within the world of publishing.

Thinking about a subject for my own blog each month has become an important part of my writing process, forcing me to stop and reflect, to fathom out and record an element of the fitful evolution of Book Two.

One conclusion I’ve drawn from all of this is the value of metaphor as a means to understand what’s going on and also, often, to express whatever I’m trying to say.

The best all-encompassing metaphor I’ve come across for our craft is Stephen King’s ‘toolbox’ of skills, devices and ways of thinking available to us as writers; how better to conceptualize an otherwise bewildering range of choices?

This month I made a mini breakthrough with my own metaphorical thinking about plot and character development. It is rather tortured and provisional, but time is short so I’m leaving it as the long version for now. It’ll probably get edited down into a sentence. Anyhow, here we go…






Once upon a time a chart-maker decided to join a ship sailing for a little-known shore. The chart-maker had dreamed of this country for a long while, months, in fact, or was it years? Now, though, this country felt knowable and reachable, even though it was a long way away. With ample supplies of coffee and tea, chocolate, wine and cake, plus parchment, pencils and ink, they set sail on a spring tide.

As the ship approached its destination, the land beyond the shoreline looked strange and forbidding, its forests impenetrable, but this was a chart in the making, not a map, so the ship travelled along the coast so the chart-maker could see it well enough to draw. Then other mariners could follow their route from beginning to end.

At first the chart-maker worried about these other mariners – would they understand the intricacies of the chart and its beautiful twistiness? – and lost sleep imagining them hating the chart, until at last he-she decided these other people were far away and hard to imagine and could be forgotten about.

The chart-maker settled down to draw.

It was hard work and frustrating. The ship was sailed by an odd crew and a troubled captain, who took them up and down the shoreline, sometimes coming within sight of land, at others times taking them far out to sea. Nevertheless, haphazardly, in fits and starts, the chart-maker recognised the shapes of peninsulas and make sense of the inlets and islands, the sandbanks and reefs.

The captain, it turned out, steered by a compass, an instrument he displayed to the crew, but in the quiet of the night, without anyone knowing (except for the chart-maker who spied on them all) she-he used a star chart to navigate by. But there were faults in these stars, faults the captain knew nothing about, and when they were discovered, insisted nothing could be done to fix them.

The chart-maker watched the captain making mistakes and growing angry, and the ship going off course and running aground, and everyone shaking their fists at the stars. Back and forth they went, up and down, in and out, until a storm (which they all knew had to come) forced the captain to mend his-her ways.

And, Oh! After the storm, the chart-maker saw the coastline clearly. Clearly enough to draw it in bold lines, clearly enough for others to follow them all the way to a harbour that the chart-maker knew from the start would be there but hadn't known how to find.



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Twelve days to birth an editable Chapter 1 - by Rowena House

What a month! After years of research, six-to-eight months of detailed plotting, and several false starts, the drafting of the work-in-progress finally began in earnest on 28 August 2022.

As it’s still going well (enough) this is a quick blog as I don’t want to lose momentum, especially as today I’ve reached a special moment in the story, when nineteen witches are brought into the courthouse for the trials of their lives.

This moment requires a detailed deconstruction of the original trial pamphlet to try and work out exactly what my protagonist, the pamphleteer, could plausibly have known about them at that instant, and what other information and opinion about them were definitely, most likely, or possibly retrofitted afterwards.

Since themes of time, memory, truth, and co-constructed narratives all weave together in the story, such details are important to me. Yes, it’s yet more research, but research intimately linked with the fiction, where I quote the pamphlet, and elaborate on it, weaving my words with his. How I’m going to deal with the issue of plagiarism for the PhD I’ve yet to work out. But I’m highlighting all direct quotes so I know what’s him and what’s me.

But I want this blog to be a snapshot of this month’s process, rather than looking again at the narrative. Specifically, what it’s been like using a detailed chapter breakdown to begin a first draft.

Turns out, it’s hard to write a story even with a plan. Yeah, I know. Who would have guessed.

By the end of Day one of a twelve-day retreat, I had a thousand new words, very few of which now remain in the draft. In fact, I cut the same number of words on Day two. Luckily, several write friends were kind enough to keep me company on Facebook and What’s App during this time, and they all pointed out how necessary and typical it is to get things wrong.

Day Two’s words were better than Day one’s, which was nice, but they still didn’t make the cut. Day three, I edited a prologue first written in October 2020 as the start of a novella-in-flash. I’m not sure it belongs in this version of the story, but it does introduce the idea of the trial being a stitch-up, a conspiracy. Which, plot-wise, is useful in giving the reader more knowledge than the protagonist from the get-go, and process-wide, it reminds me about the forces of antagonism manoeuvring off-page. The prologue can stay for now; the delete button is always on hand.

On Day four, I tore up the lot and started again. At 02.33 on Day 5, I was on FB muttering enviously about Hilary Mantel having got the voice for her Cromwell trilogy straight off. The breakthrough came when I told myself off later that same day. I’d got a plan but wasn’t sticking to it. Borrowing from the military (and Scuba divers) I wrote a new motto: You’ve planned the book, now write the plan.

Basically, stick to it (the plan) and stick at it (the draft).

Those blinkers helped me yesterday, too, when detailed study of the pamphlet caused a creative wobble over the sheer misery inflicted by one lot of human beings on another in the name of an impossible crime. Despite my best intentions, writing this story is sometimes depressing. At which point I start wondering if I’m wasting my one wild and precious life writing it. But here we are again today, sticking to it, sticking at it.

Day six of the retreat included pacing out the front boundary of an important place in the story: Knyvet House, which became Downing Street and site of the PM’s and Chancellor’s official residences. Roughly, the frontage of the property in 1612 stretched from where the Cenotaph is today to the beautiful WWII women’s memorial on Whitehall. As best as I can work it out. I also wandered around legal London again. Lincoln’s Inn, Gray’s Inn, and Staple Inn, and visited tombs in Westminster Abbey. Another time, when I've learnt how to get my photos onto the new laptop, I’ll post some of the amazing pictures I took of places where you can still touch this point in history.

Day seven (I think) was the sort of day you really can’t afford to repeat too often. Seventeen hours writing and editing, interrupted by packet soup breaks and a couple of cheese sandwiches. A productive day, during which I totally ignored my new rule ref. writing the plan and consequently had to ditch the lot on Day eight. Not a happy bunny.

Days nine and ten were frustrating, too, with the words seeming contrived and unoriginal. But then, around midnight, I chucked everything out and started again, leap-frogging the story’s inciting incident entirely, and writing the protagonist’s reactions to it instead.

And there it was the next day, saying, Will I do? And, yes it would. An experiment which cut five thousand words down to about five hundred, but they were all that was needed. A launch pad of pure character, just him and his inner thoughts, with plot and backstory only implied. I am editing it, natch, but it’s enough to say Draft 1 got started properly on 5 September 2022. Or the 6th since by then I’d lost the plot at bit. Anyhow, phew.

Template synopses Part III: the sense of an ending - Rowena House

Six weeks into a concentrated period of plotting my PhD novel-in-progress, a psychological drama based on a seventeenth century witch trial, I’ve drawn two main conclusions about using synopsis templates as planning tools.

Firstly, it’s about timing and knowing when to grab that favourite guide off the shelf or open that e-book. Second, and this is related to the first point, it’s about knowing where you most need help.

Example 1: for my debut novel, The Goose Road, synopsis templates – and the planning systems that underpin them – came to my rescue after I’d got a comprehensive rejection email from Andersen Press, a generous analysis of my MA manuscript which proved to be an invaluable editing tool.

An anxious six months later, Walker’s Mara Bergman, a wonderful editor, offered a raft of great suggestions about how to make Angelique’s story publishable.

It was the combination of Andersen’s and Mara’s advice and my own imaginative ‘knowledge’ of the story that got The Goose Road over the publishing line, but only because I’d learnt by then how to order these new elements ‘properly’.

Basically, the templates I needed back then were those that helped me to spot what was missing in the narrative and, as a consequence, why the story flagged.

With the help of James Scott Bell’s Complex Plot Grid from his Plot and Structure guide, for example, I re-wrote the manuscript so it told a staged but linear story, with all its energy and drive focused on Angelique’s journey.

This structural/development edit didn’t create the story, however. Nor did vast amounts of work with plotting systems and template synopses save the umpteen failed book twos I’ve started and discarded since then.

Why, then, have the past six weeks working with template synopses been so exciting?

That’s example 2. 

The plotting systems I’m finding useful now aren’t spotting gaps; they’re talking about overall structure and how to arrive at the best end possible. They work, I think, because two years of research, character building and experimentation with voice have provided a wealth of specific ideas to test out against their templates.

The PhD itself is handling all sorts of other stuff, like why I’m writing this story at all, and what I hope to achieve with it; I’d also delivered to my supervisors an outline for a dual narrative and twin timeframe, which got their thumbs up, before setting out on this current voyage of discovery.

Meanwhile ABBA blogs, plus notes on my Facebook author page, offer a means to analyse my writing processes in a non-judgmental way.

What was missing was the cool professional voice which say, yeah, that’s okay, but that bit sucks.

Enter the story gurus and their synopses. 

Past experience has proved that writing my way into a story is guaranteed to end in a hellish place of confusion and disappointment. Thus, when instinct suggested synopsis templates as a subject for the January ABBA post, I believe that was my subconscious saying, hey, dopey, here’s what you’ve got to do next.

That’s what I mean about timing. Last time I needed help after rejection. This time, before drafting a full manuscript. Next time (if there is one) maybe it will be after a first draft or whenever the brain yells, Stop! You need help, girl. Go find some.

This, I suspect, is why Bell’s Complex Plot Grid didn’t come up trumps this time. I’m asking different questions, and can’t expect answers from the same places (although his Writing Your Novel from the Middle again proved a good cross-reference for other guidance about midpoints).

Story Grid, on the other hand, once re-read in full, simplified a complex structure of time shifts, jump cuts and dual narratives into a logical sequence of external and internal progressions spanning five acts. I had faith it could be done; Shawn Coyne helped me figure out how.

In the past two posts I’ve gone on enough about Jeff Lyons’ plotting systems for anyone to think I’m his PR agent, so I won’t mention him again except to say my fandom extends to shelling out $325 to do his Anatomy of a Premise Line online course. Starting Wednesday. Ye-ha. That’s not to say he is the ultimate guru; it’s just his system is a good fit for the work-in-progress.

Last month I was struggling for a metaphor to describe this process of using templates as test beds for creative ideas. On Twitter, I suggested it’s futile to invent the wheel for each story, so nab someone else’s and give it a spin.

Lately, I’ve stolen another image: a mansion of many rooms. Open each template door and see if you like the layout and décor. If you do, go in and sit awhile, then design your own room.

Or maybe it’s best to stick with Stephen King and his On Writing toolbox. Template synopses are gadgets that help make stories better. When you need one, dip in.

For what it’s worth, at the start of this plotting process I thought I would be ‘nailing the story down’ and wrestling my work into shape. The story itself felt like a force of antagonism I had to get under control.

It’s not been like that in practice. And it’s not been about solving technical questions, either.

Working with plotting systems has been fluid, creative, and energizing. It’s been about opening some doors and closing others. It’s been about making more informed choices about the material I’ve got and finding out where I need more.

Working deliberately and carefully with these guides has also silenced the inner demon that insists planning is procrastination and makes snide remarks about how few words I’ve written. The story will be better for thinking first and writing second. I’m sure of it.

Twitter: @HouseRowena

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Website: rowenahouse.wordpress.com

PS I’ll close this series on synopses and plotting now, without, as promised, talking about the OCEAN-based character arc system until I figure out if it’s useful again this time around. ''ll post links to the original ABBA articles about it on my FB author page in case anyone is interested.

Six plotting synopses that are coming my rescue: Part II - Rowena House

Since last month’s post singing the praises of synopsis templates as story development tools I took my own advice and applied the first two I mentioned – Jeff Lyons’ premise line and Shawn Coyne’s Story Grid – to my work-in-progress.

Things didn’t go entirely as expected.

First up, Jeff Lyons has totally overhauled his plotting system since I read about in 2013, so it was his current, more complex, character-based ideas I’ve been exploring rather than the short, plot-based outline I described here last month.

[I have a niggling suspicious that some of us would have liked him to keep the old within the new, but there we go.]

Secondly, I worked out why I couldn’t explain Story Grid succinctly last month: I had misremembered it as an outlining tool, when in fact it is a dynamic structure to guide progressions within a well-developed story idea.

In fact, being unable to fill out the Story Grid’s Act-level boxes for my B-plot proved where I needed more detailed plotting and character development. Gaps in a grid showed where the story had holes. Duh.

 

Anyhow, rather than waffle generically about another three templates as planned, I thought this month I’d fess up and look at what went wrong and what went right – and change the title of this mini-series to the present tense from the past.

Before we get going properly, though, I will say one more thing.

Thus far, I stand by my underlying premise that tried and trustworthy story forms – expressed as synopsis templates – offer pathways into more imaginative content than stumbling into a story more or less blind.

Applying different templates to my draft outline has been super useful in terms of drilling down into the details of the dual plotlines, and a sharp reminder about the amount of plotting I’ve still got to do before embarking on a full draft.

But that’s the point, right? Better to know your map and compass are duff before heading into the woods.

So...

Working with an outline for my B-plot – one which had already established the basic plot and character components of Beth’s storyline – Shawn Coyne’s Foolscap Story Grid suggested her tale fitted best with his internal genre of Redemption.

That in turn gave Beth a Story Value of selfishness versus altruism.

[As mentioned last month, you do have to buy into Coyne’s and McKee’s concepts about Story Value as the engine driving scenes before embarking on this process. Very crudely, the flip from the value to its opposite and back again in every scene maintains energy and suspense.]

Designing scenes and sequences that force Beth to choose between selfish and altruistic outcomes is a clear, dynamic and plot-able driver of dramatic tension, one I doubt would have occurred to me had I (as planned) focussed on her personality profile, or, indeed, on any of the character archetypes out there in writing guru-land.

Thinking about plotting in Coyne’s technical way was also a useful reminder that characters aren’t people and that stories aren’t real life. Yes, a character’s psychology and emotions must be believable and coherent, but a plot is about more than people getting lost in their problems.

When planning this exercise in synopsis templates, it had seemed logical to work sequentially from an outline to a development synopsis, then amalgamate that with a Big Five personality trait-based character arc, plus a classic ‘tent pole’ structural synopsis, to create the necessary ingredients for a long-form narrative synopsis and/or to start writing draft one.

In practice, however, working iteratively with Story Grid and Jeff Lyons’ updated premise line – which now rests heavily on an internal ‘moral’ driver for the protagonist – proved surprisingly productive.

By comparing and contrasting these two systems, and feeding ideas from one to the other, I began to get a feel for how far and how fast they might take the development process, either separately or together, and more importantly how deeply they drew me into the story, the idea being, after all, to use these templates as accelerants of imagination, not cut-and-paste story designs.

Certainly, both systems flagged up areas where more research of fact and imagination are needed. They also demonstrated how important it is to integrate the different story components highlighted when following each process.

Let me explain that last point in a bit more detail.

When planning this post, I tried to think of a metaphor to illustrate what I’m attempting to say about synopses and story development. I imagined someone preparing to prune a bonsai tree, with the plant sitting on a revolving table surrounded by a glass box.

Each synopsis template – outline, development, psychological and structural – represents one side of the box; each one offers a distinct way of viewing the tree.

I intended to suggest the glass box lets us see the whole tree in 3D, and what it might eventually look like before one picked up the secateurs.

Now, however, I’m not sure I like that metaphor.

For one thing, you have to have a tree to start with. That is, a clear outline of the story as a whole. But then we are talking about development tools, so let’s assume that we do have a basic story outline ready to go.

[This is where I think Jeff Lyons’ 2013 Premise Line was really helpful, even if his updated version is more thorough.]

Another problem with the glass box metaphor is its implication that each window onto the tree remains separate when, as noted above, they need to be integrated.

This was brought home when I was reading Jeff Lyons’ Rapid Story Development which builds comprehensively on his updated Anatomy of a Premise Line. 

I like this book at lot. Its moral internal driver and structural design for a strong middle are especially alluring, even though I don’t buy into its commitment to Enneagrams as the answer to (basically all) problems about creating characters.

Ironically, though, studying this comprehensive story development programme alongside Story Grid highlighted an obvious benefit of using multiple plotting templates, i.e. the opportunity for cherry-picking.

For example, Jeff’s moral driver exposed a weakness with my own (much loved) tables for plotting epiphanies based on the Big Five personality traits of openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.

It turns out (sob) that I had been trying to overlay my ‘tent pole’ structural synopsis with a chain of Big Five-related epiphanies which were causally related to key plot points, but not driving them.

That, I now realise, is how I plotted The Goose Road, with Angelique’s staged process of maturation the result of her experiences on her journey. Her character arc was in that sense bolted onto the journey plot.

As Jeff’s analysis identified, that made Angelique reactive to events: she is a passive protagonist. (Argh!) Yes, she decides to take her geese north to save the family farm, but it is the journey that changes her; she doesn’t drive the change herself.

If I want my seventeenth century A-plot protagonist Tom to be truly proactive, to create his own predicaments as well as get himself out of them, his personality must be more central to his tale than Angelique’s was to hers.

Thanks, Jeff. Grrr...

[If your eyes are rolling at this point, bear with. The work-in-progress is based on historical evidence for a witch trial so key events in it are fixed. The challenge is to tell a good yarn that makes the points I want to make without abandoning historical credibility.]

My next plotting task would seem to be to rethink Tom and his Big Five personality profile.

But that’s good, because now I’m not only wondering what epiphanies he will have, which is where I was at the start of the month, I’m also imagining which epiphanies he will resist like fury. In other words, a whole new avenue of imagination has opened up.

By next month – hopefully – I will have more of this stuff worked out, and can move onto other synopsis templates which are helping to develop the story.

Meanwhile, spring is around the corner! Ye-ha. Thank you for reading this far.

Twitter: @HouseRowena

Facebook: Rowena House Author

Website: rowenahouse.wordpress.com

Six synopses that came to my rescue when plotting: Part I - Rowena House

As plotting devices go, it’s hard to beat a good synopsis, imho.

Not those last minute, submission synopses, written with a sense of despair that an entire story can ever be squeezed onto an A4 sheet of paper, no matter how narrow the margins.

I mean grabbing one of the many framework templates off the internet, or copying a favourite out of a book, and seeing what inspiration it can offer: how form can shape and enrich content.

If that sounds like cheating, I think of it like this: the content of a story will always be ours – personal, original, specific, owned – whereas form speaks to form, and experts in it are well worth listening to.

Confession 1: I became a bit addicted to template synopses while The Goose Road was out on submission and I no longer had the support of the Bath Spa MA in writing for young people. Rather than cheat-sheets, they helped me think about structure in a structured way. And I do love a good chart! They provide the comforting visual impression that unmanageable flights of imagination can be quantified, nailed down, and made better.

When the development offer for The Goose Road came along from Walker, these types of synopses offered a ready-made set of instructions about how to test the story’s premise, how to map out necessary revisions to the plot and deepen Angelique’s psychological arc, how to track act dynamics and plan scene polarity switches. They also helped me to identify gaps where epiphanies and/or reversals were needed, and monitor dramatic progressions and pace.

With all that objective and possible stuff to do, writer’s block became a bit of an affectation.

I know this sort of approach is anathema for a lot of people. To sceptics, I offer this quote from USA wordsmith, Chuck Wendig:

‘If outlining destroys your writing magic, editing/rewriting is going to f***ing obliterate it. One of the values of outlining is that it gives you a map forward – a fraying rope to reach for and cling to in the long darkness of the writing process. Another value is that it lets you muddle through the mistakes of your story early on – it’s a lot easier to fix a two-three page outline than it is to fix a 300 page novel. I promise.’

Convinced? Or at least willing to read on? If so, here are three of my current favourite synopsis writing techniques which I’m adapting for my historical work-in-progress for adult readers. I’ll take a look at another three next month. 

Jeff Lyons’ Premise Line Template

My notes about this system come from a 2013 article by Jeff Lyons based on his writing guide, Anatomy of A Premise Line.

The article seems to have vanished from Google, but a Kindle edition of the book is still available on Amazon. Personally, I think it’s a cracking method of driving down into the core of a story, and I’m going to buy his book to say thank you for the number of times I’ve found it invaluable as a writer, mentor and editor.

Lyons recommends establishing the story’s core structure first, then refine it into a solid premise line (or elevator pitch) before writing the book. Personally, I find his template invaluable mid-development, too.

For my PhD manuscript, I’m trusting to a creative instinct that an episode from the past which has nagged at me for well over a decade must have something to say. Transforming this instinct into a commercial premise line a la Jeff Lyons is part of the discovery process.

Lyons’ template is extremely practical. It also takes an exact form: that is, a story must be able to conform to this outline:

‘When an event sparks a character to action, that character acts with deliberate purpose until that action is opposed by an external force, leading to some [life altering] conclusion.’

I’ve added the life altering bit to this direct quote, but it’s there in the back-up text.

Basically, if the core elements of your outline cannot be mapped onto the template, then you don’t (yet) have a story; you have a situation.

To develop your situation into a story, you have to drill down into each clause of the template sentence, and provide specifics to describe the protagonist and their situation, what sparks them to act, what exactly their goal is, plus the nature of the forces of antagonism ranged against them, and the story’s conclusion.

I won’t steal his thunder by going into detail about his techniques for arriving at a blisteringly good story outline, but here is his worked example of a premise line for Peter Benchley’s Jaws:

‘When a fish-out-of-water, big-city cop moves to a small, coastal town dependent on tourism, he must team up with an oceanographer and a crusty sailor to convince the doubting, money-grubbing townsfolk to close their beaches because a giant, man-eating shark is lurking just offshore, until the shark strikes, forcing the townsfolk to allow the cop and his buddies to take on the shark mano-a-mano.’

Here’s mine for Dora Greenfield’s plotline in Iris Murdoch’s The Bell:

‘When a scatter-brained, bullied wife returns to her academic husband at work at a religious community which serves the Benedictine nuns of a Gloucestershire Abbey, she secretly plots with a young fellow guest to recover a legendary bell from the Abbey’s lake in defiance of the community’s narrow-minded moral code. The community breaks apart in the aftermath of their antics, freeing her from her incandescent husband.’

Having drafted a premise line for Beth Knyvet, co-protagonist in my work-in-progress, I have discovered one problem with Lyons’ system: I’m now so keen on her story I want it to be the A plot, not a subplot!

Story Grid Foolscap Template

Of all the step-by-step analytical frameworks for a full storyline from the big guns of film and TV scriptwriting, Shawn Coyne’s Story Grid Foolscap Template is one I am returning to for the WIP for its dynamism and (apparent) simplicity.

To use it you have to buy into the notion of Story Values and polarity switches as plot drivers (from happy to sad, for example, alive to dead, afraid/brave, in prison/free etc.) and also spend time studying his ideas before the downloadable template makes sense, but if you’re a fan of Robert McKee a lot of the basics will be familiar.

Thinking about Story Grid for this blog, I believe the difference between it and many other whole-story templates – and here Christopher Vogel’s Writer’s Journey circular chart and John Yorke’s five-act table spring to mind – is the stress Coyne places from the outset on change and progression.

It seems there is limitless advice out there about story beats and structural plot points (the infamous inciting incidents, calls to adventure, midpoints, crises and climaxes) but once you know the function of these beats, it’s more helpful (to my mind at least) to delve into how to deliver them, rather than making up endless permutations on the basic model.

I’m going to have to read back into Story Grid carefully as my optimism that I could provide a potted version of it within the time I have available to write this blog proved illusory, and I don’t want to confuse anyone, including myself, as it is a thought-provoking and worthwhile exercise to apply Coyne’s methods to a story outline.

Its richness can be accessed here: www.storygrid.com

 

Long-form narrative synopsis

This is the opposite form of synopsis to Lyons’ one or two sentence premise line. It is a chronicle of the whole story, with the chains of causation that lead to structural high points described and analysed.

This depth of analysis allows the writer to delve into the thematic significance of major plot points, and to make sure the linkages between character-led actions and the protagonist’s psychological development/epiphanies are logical and progressively more dramatic.

Gaps and inconsistencies jump out of the text if you’re being honest with yourself at this level; there’s no place for weak plot devices to hide.

You can divide a narrative synopsis however you like. I prefer acts as divisions to keep the big picture in mind. If you’re summarizing a completed manuscript from the perspective of chapters, Darcy Patterson’s Novel Metamorphosis two-sentences per chapter tabular system still works best for me. Thanks, as always, to BookBoundUK for this recommendation.

For works-in-progress, it is well worth keeping each iteration of a narrative synopsis on file in case a brilliant new idea turns out to be nonsense; an earlier version can then come to the rescue.

Personally, I let narrative synopses expand to whatever length they need to be. They’re working documents which can be edited down to one or two pages later, depending on an agent’s or editor’s submission requirements.

Confession 2: as a writer, this is the development stage where my stories go to die.

My synopses folder contains half a dozen titles abandoned after a thorough narrative synopsis, mostly because I discovered that I did not believe in them enough to commit years of my life to writing them. Others are left festering there from the days when I was desperate to get Book Two published, but repeatedly hit an external brick wall.

With hindsight, this was an okay point to say goodbye to most of these ideas, even if it hurt at the time. Better to let something go than waste time pumping its weakly fluttering heart.

The exception is a World War I novel set in German-occupied eastern France which I still believe in and regret spiking because my then publisher didn’t want it, not least (I imagine) because anyone could tell the market for WW1 fiction was saturated by 2018.

One day I might go back to it; a lot of its energy is still stored in its various synopses.

Next month I’ll look at three more types of synopses currently being co-opted into service for the work-in-progress: James Scott Bell’s Complex Plot Grid, my own OCEAN psychological profiling table, and the classic structural ‘tent pole’ technique. If I’ve remembered by then why Story Grid is so brilliant I’ll add that too!

Meanwhile, I’d love to hear about your favourite plotting systems. And good reasons to hate synopses. Either way, hope you have fun with your New Year writing. 

Twitter: @HouseRowena

Website: www.rowenahouse.wordpress.com

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When a Pantser Meets a Plan, by Claire Fayers

 It probably started in school. Having to waste time (as I saw it) constructing a story plan when I wanted to get on with writing the story. Then, once I was finally allowed to start writing, I'd always have a better idea for what could happen and I'd be marked down because my story didn't follow my plan.

A plan was an immutable, set-in-stone straitjacket that crushed the life out of stories turned the fun of creation into mind-smothering tedium. People who wrote plans were terrifying caricatures of orderliness. They probably folded all their socks neatly into pairs and had little dividers in their underwear drawers. I was above all that. I was a free-spirited creative who would never stoop to the mundane business of actually thinking about what I wanted to write. 

I got away with it for a while. My first three books sold off a finished draft, a half page outline for book two and an agreement that we'd think about the third book later. It was a bit of a shock to the system when I discovered I was expected to write a proposal for book three.

Mirror Magic was by far the hardest book to write. My first draft didn't match my proposal at all. 'I don't remember this character from the outline,' my editor commented. That's because I didn't know he existed when I wrote the outline. He didn't appear in my head until I was writing chapter four. 

Following Mirror Magic, Storm Hound came out in a rush with very little planning, confirming what I'd known all along: I don't do outlines. In fact, if I ever tried to write a plan, it would obliterate my will to write. How could I maintain enthusiasm for a story if I already knew what was going to happen in it?

Storm Hound came and went and I started a new book. My agent asked for an outline. (What is is with all these people wanting outlines? Don't they know who I am?)  After several attempts we agreed I should just write the book. At the Folly Farm retreat that year, Jo Nadin talked about how she plans her books in painstaking detail, and I listened in awe and terror. But later it occurred to me that a lot of what Jo called planning - researching characters and places, writing down snippets of dialogue - I call writing my first draft. 

Was I actually planning without realising it? Surely not.

A few months ago, I started a new project. As usual, I had the first chapter in my head and then some sketchy details. As usual, I got five or six chapters in and got stuck.

At the same time, my critique group was discussing how to structure a novel. Structure - ha! Structure is the evil sidekick of planning. It is an immutable, set-in-stone straitjacket that crushes the life out of stories. Which was ironic, considering my new project was banging its head against the brick wall of I-don't-know-what-to-write-next.

The last straw came in the form a friend asking if I'd do a skill-sharing session. The topic: structure. I laughed an ironic laugh and agreed.  Naturally, I planned what to say, because in all other areas of life it is perfectly reasonable to plan ahead. As I talked about different story structures and the many novel-planning methods that I had never used, a thought hit me like a bolt of obviousness from the blue.

In fact, you can change your plan as you go. There's no teacher looking over your shoulder to make sure you do it properly. 

I did something I'd never done before when writing - I opened a spreadsheet. At the top of the first column I wrote: Chapter. At the top of the second: What happens.

I started with the chapters I'd already written, then I thought about what could happen in the rest of the story. I jotted down possible scenes, moved them about (so easy to do on a spreadsheet) and I even, in a fit of unprecedented enthusiasm, added columns for wordcount and dates so I could track my progress.

At the end of the week, I gazed at the spreadsheet and realised I'd planned a entire novel. And, for some reason, the planning didn't crush my enthusiasm to write, instead I was eager to get started.

I'm now ten chapters in and I've already changed my plan four times. Whenever I have a new idea, it goes into the spreadsheet, which is a lot easier than deleting and rewriting several thousand words because I've changed my mind.

Am I converted? Time will tell. Every book is different to write and maybe next time I'll go back to making it up as I go along. But for now, planners, I am proud to be one of you!

Planning: how it didn't go to plan but that's OK - Rowena House

The past month was meant to be dedicated to planning the 17^th century work-in-progress. 

            Instead, a structural plan for the entire novel dropped onto a Word document within one day of starting it, presumably the product of months of thinking about the two viewpoint characters, reams of background notes taken in the early hours and late at night, and subconscious decision-making about the story as a whole. 

            Hurrah! But...

            When it came to writing a new chapter from that plan, it didn’t really help.

            Worse still, the time I’d allocated to planning was being gobbled up with puppy training (yay), domestic tasks (blast ’em) and edits that were making a not-too-awful first draft of Chapter Two into a proper sow’s ear.

            SCBWI South West and MAWYP writer buddy Lesley Moss immediately spotted what was happening when I mentioned on Facebook how badly the edits were going.

            She asked if these messy edits were part of the discovery process for that character, and of course she was right. I didn’t know Beth Knyvet well enough to write from inside her head, even if a lucky break with the research had shown me her home in sufficient detail that I could be in that place beside her.

            [You’d have thought after fourteen years writing fiction off-and-on I’d be a bit more on the ball with this stuff, but hey, we’ve all got a lot going on, right?]

            The question now is whether to backtrack and craft Chapter Two before re-writing it. That is, list the escalating conflicts she’ll face – inner, inter-personal, environmental/physical and societal; nail a turning point; and identify a Story Value with a clear polarity switch (AKA Story Grid/McKee’s Story planning) or continue to wander through Beth’s moonlit garden in 1612 London, discovering what ails her, even if that’s likely to be far slower than sitting down and planning the scene upfront.

             Since I’m not hoping to write for a living any more (and well, you know, life, Covid, Brexit and now the vigil on Clapham Common and which way Labour will vote on the Police Bill) I think I’m going to stick with the fun bit of wandering and wondering.

            If nothing else, even when a scene is carefully planned, it is the unexpected that tends to produce the best linkages to the next scene, the most surprising yet natural because of that...

            Meanwhile, for every major character, there will at some point be a Story Grid alongside the copious biographical notes already on file. The precise nature of the relationship between my two viewpoint characters will also have to be sorted out, and Chapter Three is a biggie, so it’ll need plenty of time.

            But so what? Why stress about any of it? In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t matter a hoot if this story takes one year to write or ten.

            I'm also stopping this post here as it's Mother's Day as I'm writing it, and my wonderful son and his lovely girlfriend are making me dinner. A first. And life's too short not to savour every moment of such joys.

            I hope your writing brings you pleasure at least some of the time, and when it’s not, you feel it’s okay to stop and do something kinder to yourself. Take care and be safe. Clocks go forward soon. :o)

Twitter: @HouseRowena

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rowenahouseauthor

Website: rowenahouse.com

Mostly dog pics on Instagram

PS apologies for lack of pictures. Blogger and my laptop were having a tiff. 

 

             

           

             

             

           

Planning on planning by Jess Butterworth

Today I feel as if I'm in a film, because this afternoon I'm flying into London to surprise not one, but two, of my best friends for their birthdays (conveniently a few days apart).

And I'm so very excited.

I'll be doing other things too, like visiting bookshops and meeting my editor, which I also can't wait to do. 

All this has taken a lot of planning with many people involved. And with Christmas not being quite the successful catch-up time I had envisaged, a lot of deadlines are being met at the last minute (right now I'm counting on my four hour layover to be as productive as four hours in my office). 

This has got me thinking that for this year I want to try and be even more organised. Or, if I am doomed to a never-ending to-do list, then to at least effectively orchestrate the list in a balanced way. And, as I plan out my year, I've decided this means that the list should include things like time to deal with the unexpected, see friends and loved ones, go idea hunting/spend time outside.     

And sometimes all I want is to lock myself away from everything and write. A writing retreat sounds pretty wonderful. Maybe I should plan one of those too.  

Contemplating the new year. 

I know that planning every second of every day isn't very realistic or fun, but thinking about it helps me to be more mindful. And that's what I'm really aiming for.

Here's to a joyful 2018! 

Love,

Jess

jessbutterworth.com

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To Plan or Not to Plan – Heather Dyer

I spent a lovely weekend actually having a break, for once. I stayed with a friend (we’re both freelancers) and all we did was:

1. Talk.
2. Laugh.
3. Eat.
4. Drink espresso martinis.
5. Plant a tray of beans.
6. Watch the birds and insects going about their business in the garden. (It’s always nice watching others work.)

As freelancers, it's difficult to allow ourselves to take time off, and we never seem to stop worrying about our goals.

Ellen asked me what I was reading and I told her: Trying Not to Try: The Ancient Art of Effortless and the Surprising Power of Spontaneity.

Ellen then showed me her bedtime reading: a slim self-help book all about using goal-setting and planning to get everything you ever wanted.

Hmm. How can both of these books be right?

Ellen’s book was full of good advice about listing your goals, breaking them down into steps, and scheduling your time. But there were a few things I took issue with (one being the implication that self-discipline (or was it hard work?) explains why 90% of the people earn 10% of the money). But I found one of the questions particularly interesting:

“If you could realize one of your goals in the next 24 hours, which one of them would make the greatest difference to your life, if you had it now?” 

By imagining how you’d feel if your most important goal had already been achieved, you come right down to this moment, and get a glimpse of how life (and you) might be changed. The right goal is the one that would make the most difference to your life now. (When I tried this I was quite surprised and wondered if I’d been getting my priorities right.)

Unlike Ellen's book, my own book seemed to advocate prioritizing the present moment over distant goals. Worrying about the future is exhausting – and often misguided. The present moment is really all we have, and all potential resides only here and now, so we must pay attention to the situation and our feelings now.

"If what happens now does influence what happens next," says Jon Kabat-Zinn, in Wherever You Go, There You Are, "then doesn’t it make sense to look around a bit from time to time so that you are more in touch with what is happening now, so that you can take your inner and outer bearings and perceive with clarity the path that you are actually on and the direction in which you are going? If you do so, maybe you will be in a better position to chart a course for yourself that is truer to your inner being – a soul path, a path with heart, your path…"

And a book's path too, perhaps?

When I got home, I went for a walk on the beach and was minding my own business taking notes in the sand dunes (as a writer does) when I was surprised by a drone.

It hovered above me, looking straight at me, then flew away again. When I walked back along the beach I discovered that the drone belonged to a group of soldiers from the local base.

The drone got me thinking: sometimes we need to see the terrain ahead, to get an idea of where we’re going and where we are in the landscape. But in writing, as in life, we are foot soldiers.When we're on foot it’s the immediacy of our surroundings that takes precedence. You need to be able to respond to what presents itself. To live and write you need to be in the thick of things, not strategizing remotely.

But can a whole novel really be put together without planning? Can a whole life be lived in the present? If we don’t know where we’re headed, won’t we wander aimlessly, ending up nowhere?

I suppose the answer is balance. As Eckhart Tolle explains in Practicing the Power of Now: "It’s dangerous when we become more motivated by the end goal than by the present moment. When psychological time [thinking about the future] takes over, our attention has been stolen by the future. The Now is no longer honored and becomes reduced to a mere stepping-stone to the future, with no intrinsic value." Then, says Tolle, "Your life’s journey is no longer an adventure, just an obsessive need to arrive, to attain, to 'make it.'"

Concentrating on the moment allows us to dig deeper. In writing, digging deep can feel like tapping into the underground river that will carry the narrative along.

So, planning has its uses. Every now and then we might need an aerial perspective to see how far we’ve wandered from the main route. But creative insight happens when we’re paying close attention to the situation now - and letting that take precedence.

Heather Dyer, Royal Literary Fund Consultant Fellow

http://rlfconsultants.com/consultants/heather-dyer/

www.heatherdyer.co.uk