Part of the reason we are so on the ball this year is that We Have A Plan. Mr. Xandra and I sat down sometime back in October or November and decided we needed a Garden Vision, instead of a half-assed, “Wouldn’t it be nice to have fresh vegetables and cut down on the grocery bills a little?” idea that never quite pans out. Except in zucchini. Man, if money were measured to the zucchini standard, you could call me Croesus. We drew charts. On graph paper. And we planned out how many boxes we wanted, as well as what would go in ‘em. So after the Snowpocalypse finally melted away and the sun remembered that people live here and kinda need to see it every once in a while, we knew where we were going and we could hit the ground (literally) running (metaphorically).  I’ve recently begun to adopt some of this to my writing, because next to that feeling of  writing “The End,” there’s nothing quite like the feeling of, “yeah, I know where I’m going with this.” When you’ve got headlights in the dark, you can punch the accelerator.

Now, I come from a long history of pantsing. Back when my stories were written in crayon, I had fantastic starts that ended up in really random places, often dead-ends. I still go through multiple revisions, and I think I’ve probably as of now trashed twice as many words as I’ve kept. When I strike out into The Unknown, I usually do it without a map.

But lately, I’ve had to modify my adventuring into the mists. Writing time is always at a premium, and I have a backlog of ideas and a backlog of stories partially written or in varying stages of revision that aren’t doing anybody any good sitting on my home network.  So I said, this time, I’m doing it different.

Now usually, the career pantser will interject with the horror story of trying, and failing, to navigate by plot outline or something. And in the past, that’s been the case for me. Once a story’s plotted, it’s out of my head, and I have little desire to actually write it.  It goes in the file for “Save for the future when I need ideas.” Only problem is…I haven’t run out of ideas. Ideas are the one thing a writer rarely runs out of. But this time, I’m doing it different. I’m not taking a map.  I’m taking a compass.

Our garden plan is an awesome thing in theory. In practice, well, no plan survives contact with the enemy, as the saying goes, and this is the case with both the garden plan and the WIP outline. What the garden plan did was give us dimensions and boundaries in which to work. It gave us a compass and a sextant to find true north, and showed us the boundaries of our world.  That’s what I’ve taken with me in my WIP. I don’t have an outline plotted to the nth detail.  But I know where the shady spot is, where the swampy bits are, and which bits of green are the weeds.

It won’t tell me the exact path to take, but it will show me which ones are growing in the right direction. The steps I take are part of the discovery.