Ever since I was small I remember telling stories. Before I could write I was skipping up and down, telling stories to anyone, everyone or even no one. It seems to be part of what make s me 'me' and I can't imagine not doing it. Sometimes the stories exist only in my imagination, never getting written down and they exist for as long as I continue to muse on them. More often they are scribbled in a notebook or typed up somewhere to be discovered half-formed at a later date. These stories all came about by 'pantsing', flying by the seat of my pants. I think this is my default way of making stories. I begin to tell myself a tale and see where it takes me. There is no structure and I have no idea what will happen. This is how I 'won' at NaNoWriMo many years ago. I sat at my laptop with a vague idea and typed away letting it flow from me. No structure, no narrative arc, no sense of an ending. P Number One.
As soon as I started to get more 'serious' about writing I was 'advised' that I needed to plan my work. It was important that I sorted out my narrative arc, wrote character summaries, knew how each scene played out before I typed a single word. So I tried every planning method I could, scribbled stuff down and promptly forgot about most of it once I started writing. Hands were thrown up in horror and I was again 'advised' to keep my planning tight, to prioritise it, to spend almost as much time planning as I did writing. And I stopped writing as much or as often because my plans were never quite right. P Number Two.
Naturally, the third P is Procrastination. All the stressing about planning stopped me writing and I found more and more reasons why I couldn't do it at the moment, today, tomorrow, who knows when. I dithered and played about with ideas but my heart sank at the thought of planning the perfect story. And here comes P Number Four - Perfection. I became obsessed with making the perfect, most detailed plan that I was paralysed - no, that's not Number Five! If my plan wasn't perfect then there was no way I could write my story. Because 'real' writers have a brilliant, perfect plan. Don't they? So I soon gave up on all my ideas and the writing almost stopped. The stories would still pop into my head and entertain my imagination but I found myself telling them that I was sorry but they'd never get written. They were just too fluid, too unformed and refused to conform to a plan. Jelly stories flooding all over the place with no mould to flop into.
P Number Five is Publication. If I was to be a 'real' writer, a 'proper' writer then I had to get stuff published. Didn't I? And to get stuff published I had to plan and make it perfect and bloody well get it written. But I was procrastinating because nothing was planned or perfect and round and round I went, getting nowhere.
Here I am, contemplating the terror of the Five P's.
Stuck and blocked and with an idea that I thought was great but had a terrible ending. So I started to unpick another plan, changing the ending and the darn thing morphed into a different story. Which needs planning, of course. So I'll make some tea, stare out of the window and try to be a good girl and plan out the new idea. If I can stop procrastinating about perfection in planning that is!
