Instructionals: How to Plan Your Project

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Once you've set up your commitments and goals from the Previous Article, you can begin the planning and research phase of your project!

Some writers are able to miraculously sit down with an idea in their head, and write their entire piece from beginning to end, without any plans or forethought. But for normal people, this is not the case! There are many different methods that allow you to organize your thoughts and plan out your story or message before you put your first sentence on the page. For my writing, I usually end up with a messy hybrid of several techniques-- it's up to the writer to decide the best way to plan!

Planning can come in many forms-- a concise one-sentence summary, a  massive mind-map of the different characters, topics, subplots, or chapters, and your basic numbers/bulleted outline are just some of thousands of planning methods. Some people will plan out every detail of every scene, writing up detailed documents for every setting, drawing sketches for every character, and doing extensive research for every concept or topic presented. Others will simply take a note of their initial idea, and begin at page one, word one.

7-Point Structure

If you are writing a narrative, the 7-Point Plot Structure by Dan Wells is very useful. The concept is that instead of a 3-point plot (beginning, middle, and end), each story has 7 points:

1. The Hook
2. Plot Turn 1
3. Pinch 1
4. Midpoint
5. Pinch 2
6. Plot Turn 2
7. Resolution

Be sure to watch all five of Dan Wells' videos, as he goes on to create a 7-point plot chart for each of four plot categories, such as the "action" side of the plot, the "romantic" side of the plot, the "internal struggles", and the "betrayal" side. Planning in this way will help you to create a balanced plot, intertwining different story elements into your scenes, and it gives you a good layout for continuing to plan out chapters.

The Snowflake Method

Another method, the Snowflake Method by Randy Ingermanson, is less narrative-oriented, and works best for any large piece of writing, fiction or non-fiction. He has you begin by spending an hour coming up with a 15-words-or-less summary of your proposed piece of writing. Then, spend another hour expanding that sentence into a full paragraph. Next, break your paragraph up into a full-page summary for each character, and so on. Continue expanding-- each sentence becomes a paragraph, each paragraph becomes a scene, clusters of scenes become a chapter, and you're on the way the finishing your draft.

This principle is interestingly name the "Snowflake Method," because it is based off of the Koch Snowflake, which begins as a simple triangle, then multiplies each side symmetrically into more and more lines to form a complex snowflake shape.

Book In A Month

One last planning resource is Victoria Lynn Schmidt's Book In A Month. It is a step-by-step guide to crafting a fictional narrative in 30 days, and comes with tons of helpful worksheets, checklists, and charts to help you plan things out. Although it is very easy, straightforward, and helpful, the book follows a very cookie-cutter template for novel writing, so I've never gone through the entire book. I like to steal the worksheets and character charts for planning purposes, but I tend to leave the rest.

A Good Ending Quote

You should take as much time as you need to plan out your piece before beginning to write. The more time spent in planning, the less time you will spend fixing things in the future, as with anything. It will also help you flesh out more details that are difficult to fix later on-- it's easier to fix an outline than an entire novel! 

Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe. -Abraham Lincoln

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