The expression “No Plan Survives First Contact with the Enemy” is pretty common. However, it is worth noting the whole context of the quote where this idiom (probably) came from:
In 1871, Prussian Field Marshal Helmuth Von Moltke wrote an essay with the line (boldness added by me), “No plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first encounter with the main enemy forces. Only the layman believes that in the course of a campaign he sees the consistent implementation of an original thought that has been considered in advance in every detail and retained to the end.”
The highlighted bit made me reflect a lot about my growth from an amateur writer to a more professional creator. Recently, I had a discussion with some other writers about how much time we spend “plotting, writing, and pantsing.” For the purposes of this discussion, we’ll define plotting as “planning out the steps and progression of your story’s plot (A happens, therefore B happens but C occurs to disrupt B).” Writing is the physical act of writing or drawing your story. And “pantsing” is literally flying by the seat of your pants.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve really grown to embrace the pantsing portion of the writing process. As a young writer- for example, when Fortuna Saga was being written- I would agonize for weeks on trying to plot out every single turn and counterpoint of the plot. It was only near the end of Act 4 in the Fortuna Saga that I really felt that the story took a life of its own. The characters began driving the plot instead of me trying to corral it to a conclusion.
The plotting portion is important. It’s valuable to think about the world as a whole and how the various timelines and perspectives should reasonably intermesh. It’s also really easy to get lost in Planning Paralysis where no writing actually gets done, the story loses momentum, and things might ultimately get stuck. Plotting is necessary because you need something to throw away and rewrite as the story takes a life of it own. It’s painful to admit, but that first plan is never, ever going to work. That’s why the pantsing portion of the process is important. It gives the story life. It helps snap the story into something more alive and emergent. Forcing a plot to conform to the original plan is amateurish and breaks the story.
My method is a constant cycle of plotting, writing, and pantsing over and over again. I’m sure there are writers that can plot out every detail of a story and then make the story work within that original plan, but I suspect they are the exceptions to the rule. For me, big aspects of the story stay the same. It’s the paths that we take to explore these big aspects that will diverge and take exciting new journeys. Sometimes these paths will undermine the original plot. Sometimes it will breathe an uncomfortable wrinkle in what was once an easy choice. It can be really painful but it’s never destructive.
Out of curiosity, I dug up some of my old paper notes from (*cough*) 2007 when I was finishing up Fortuna Saga and plotting out the greater details of how I wanted the then forming Hymns of the Apostate and the distant Lost Noise to tie into each other. This particular page caught my eye because it was a more detailed breakdown of the ‘Lens’ from Fortuna Saga. I had assumed that much of it would be obsolete at this point, but most of it is still valid (and has been redacted due to potential spoilers). We’ll see how much of this stands once Lost Noise is said and done. It proves that good plotting can be a north star to keep a story on track, but I’m more than prepared to throw most of this away if I need to.
