Update 29 - Planning a Story for Too Long

The featured image at the top of this post shows my current word and page count for my notes on True North. I’ve almost hit 100,000 words worth of outline, world building, writing reminders and general research. The page count matters less, given formatting variations. This seems like an impressive amount of work, and maybe it is cumulatively, but let me put that in context.

I started this story, called True North, in October of 2019. I have not published a single story from the greater whole, and I have stopped and started drafts of the same stories almost a dozen times over the past five years. There’s an idea that when writing, we are either “planners” or “pantsers”. Planners plan, Pantsers fly by the seat of their pants, making things up as they go along more.

I’ve always been more of a planner, and that extends to more than just my writing. If we pair this with a jacked metabolism and a whipped-dog attitude, you get someone milling around in the planning stages until he dies. It is easier, if not more satisfactory, to dream than to render. Writing is work, as enjoyable as it is.

Planning and outlining is not the same as writing a draft. I have been so scared about how the story will be received, so scared that I won’t communicate what I wish to clearly, that I have sunk myself in irrelevant details and working out a believable world. That being said, what is the point of making a believable world that you can’t share with anyone?

Over the past month, I’ve been cannibalizing my last draft of True North. It was bits and pieces of the greater whole, but I had an idiot’s aspirations in the way again. When I first started True North, I wanted to write the longest work of continuous fiction in the west. Three-plus million words. It took me far too long to realize that reaching a specific word count defeats the purpose of telling a good story. A good story is only as long as it needs to be to communicate what the author wanted. I think.

Then, about a year ago, I got the idea that I should break the story up into 78 tales, with their own tarot-style themes and covers. Only recently did I abandon that idea. That specific format seemed again, superfluous, excessive, egotistic and pretentious.

In finalizing my latest outline, I have it down a little better I think. From 78 books across 4 volumes, to several stories across 14 books. And the greater whole is better kept in mind. The themes, the beats, for the first time since I’ve started it feels like I have a coherent idea of how the second half of the story goes.

I’m excited. It’s good work. But it’s not the work I mean to do. It’s five years of preparation and the nervous shuffling of papers. I’m starting the latest draft, and I’m giving myself a word goal per day to put into it. Research and outlining is no longer going to count towards my writing time. If I want to write, then I should write. I would encourage the same of anyone else. Please show courage enough to tell the story you want to tell, but be wise enough to know you will make mistakes. That’s alright. It’s all human.