Okay, I've Enough, Now

…to start writing!

I suspect most of us who don't dismiss planning altogether plan very little. We use minimal planning, mostly starting with a skeleton and then inventing things as we realize we need them.

It's a lot easier than extensive planning, true, but... Like all the methods, it has its problems. We might miss an important element of our world, then find ourselves facing a novel with a plot hole at the end. If we plan too minimally, we might find ourselves trapped in a world with nowhere to go without breaking any of the world's rules.

That's why the person who plans minimally should be well aware of the genre he's writing. If it's a Harry Potter-ish fantasy, you'll have to know three worlds: the magic world, the non-magic world, and where they intersect and how. You'll also need to know how much each world knows about the others, and if it's very little, why? What keeps the worlds from learning about each other?

That doesn't mean you'll have to know the name of every single ruler or governor, but it does mean you'll need to know if a Council of Wizards persecutes any non-magical person who learns of magic. The details may not necessarily end up in your story (or article, if you for example at first intend to write about different learning styles and realize that's too broad a topic for one article), but that groundwork likely will.

On the upside, minimal planning means you probably don't need to decide your hero's favorite food at the outset of the story until page 86 when you need it. (Even then, you can likely change it later, depending on your plot.) It means you only have to know the groundwork that runs what you're writing, like one of those keyword outlines you might've preferred writing in school.

For the minimalist planner, the writing still brings a wealth of discovery and probably change. You might finish writing a novel this month and realize the name Kerr would suit your hero better than Paul does. (Okay, fine; I've not finished writing that one, yet.)

The planning's comparatively easy, once you figure out what you need to know and what you need to do to figure it out. But the writing can still be oh-so-hard.