Planning is hard

 I've been struggling with the balance of planning since I started writing.

I am not a patient person. In some ways, that's a strength. I don't wait to start things, unless I have a very good reason to. When I decided I was ready to write my first book, I started that day. When I decided to get fit, same thing. Unfortunately, I've historically tended to grow impatient with the planning process, and jump into projects before I've fully thought them through.

Early on, I would throw together a plan in an evening, start writing the next day, and hammer out an 80'000 word first draft in a couple months. The trouble with that method, of course, is that you have to work from an ill thought-out, often vague plan, which means you're likely to need multiple full rewrites. The rewriting was often where I'd get stuck. The gap between that first pen-and-paper draft, and the second planned, polished, typed draft seemed too wide to cross at times.

And of course, this method is even worse for something heavily-illustrated, like a graphic novel, or a visual novel.

One of my last big writing projects was a complete rewrite of one of those six-month-thrown-together first drafts. I threw out almost everything but the character and the basic premise to move the story into a larger setting I'd been developing. All I really had left was a sense for the flavour of the story, and even that I didn't have properly nailed down. I worked from a very rough outline, and my idea for what the story was supposed to be changed as I went. Halfway through the draft, I'd changed my mind about the story's core themes and how to develop them several times. Writer's block was derailing me at least every other chapter.

It wasn't long after that that I realized the strategy I'd been experimenting with of "write it straight through, changing past events as necessary" was not working in the slightest. And it wasn't long after that that I realized the writer's block - or perhaps writer's confusion - that pervaded the project ran too deep, and finally decided to shelf it for a while.

Over all, it was a very good learning experience. I realized if I wasn't ready to plan something in detail, I likely wasn't ready to write it - unless I wanted to do a six-month-thrown-together first draft. (Come to think of it, that project might have benefited from a second first draft right about then.)

 For my current project, I'm leaning, perhaps, toward the opposite extreme of planning. I have a careful outline of every chapter, and even every scene at key points. I have files on all the characters and locations. I have outlines of all the subplots and character conflicts, and how they develop through the scenes and chapters.

My goal is to write a first draft that won't require major rewrites, since I want to publish this project as a web serial.

I'm trying to fight back against that impatience and take things slowly.

After my three week planning marathon, I decided to switch gears for a moment, and make a complete test chapter - illustrations, prose, music, code. I'm about halfway through it at the moment. Currently, I'm working on stringing the story together with the illustrations. It'll probably be done in about another week. It's coming together even better than I expected.

When the test chapter is done, I'll go back to the plan for a while. I've realized as I worked on the illustrations that I messed up on some of the logistics for where the characters were and when, so I'll fix that. I'll also take another wide look at the chapters, and the conflicts. I want to do at least one more test chapter as well, to see if I can streamline the process a bit more.

The current test chapter has some potential spoilers in it, so I probably won't be publishing it any time soon, but I'm leaning toward making the second test chapter into something of a teaser/short-story, so I may be able to show that soon.

OK. I guess that's all for now. I'll touch base soon.