Or The Plan Had Other Plans
I’m currently ten chapters into book number five. I won’t give anything away, not yet, but I will say this much: the plan I started with and the book I’m actually writing are, at this point, only distant related. I did the responsible thing first. I organised the plot properly, split it into chapters, built the suspense at the right intervals, kept it light and funny in the way I try to keep things light and funny. Two chapters in, I was quietly writing a different book entirely. The feelings arrived somewhere around the first sentence and simply took over from there, and I let them. I’m enjoying where it’s gone, whether or not it’s anywhere near where I originally pointed it.
I used to find this mildly alarming, as someone who likes a plan the way some people like a well-organised drawer. Now I think it might be the most honest way anything worthwhile ever gets made.
Plans aren’t the enemy here, to be clear. They’re essential, actually. You need a target to aim the effort at, otherwise the effort has nowhere useful to go. A plan gives you a reason to get up and do the hard, unglamorous part of anything, the early chapters, the extra shift, the years of getting slightly better at something before anyone notices. Nobody achieves much by drifting with no destination at all. That’s not what this is about.
What this is about is what happens when life, or a plot, takes an unscheduled turn and you can no longer see the target from where you’re standing. The instinct, understandably, is to correct course immediately, to fight your way back to the original route as if the detour itself were a mistake that needs undoing. Sometimes that’s right. But sometimes the detour is the actual point, and the mistake would be insisting on the original map instead of noticing where you’ve actually ended up and whether it’s better than where you were headed.
This is harder than it sounds, because letting go of a plan feels, in the moment, indistinguishable from failing at one. It isn’t. There’s a real difference between abandoning something because it got difficult and abandoning the map because the territory turned out to be more interesting than expected. The first is giving up. The second is paying attention. Telling them apart, in the moment, while you’re standing in the middle of both feeling equally uncertain, is the genuinely difficult part, and I don’t think there’s a clean formula for it. Mostly you just have to be honest with yourself about which one it is.
I won’t pretend it isn’t frightening. Letting go of a plan you spent real time building means, for a while, not knowing exactly where you’re going, and most of us are not naturally comfortable with that particular flavour of not-knowing. There’s no map for it, no chapter outline, just the next sentence, and then the one after that, written slightly blind. But there’s a specific feeling that turns up when you finally get to the end of something you didn’t fully plan, a mix of relief and disbelief and something close to pride, that a version of you that stuck rigidly to the original outline would simply never have access to. It’s difficult to describe accurately. You mostly have to arrive at it yourself.
So make the plan. Set the target. Have the reason to work hard, because you’ll need it on the days the work is genuinely unglamorous. Just don’t mistake the plan for the destination itself. If life, or the plot, quietly pulls you somewhere the outline never mentioned, it might be worth staying a while before deciding it’s a wrong turn. Some of the better chapters were never on the original page.
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