What does it take to get yourself organized? How organized are you?
If you’ve been following me for any length of time, you know my oft repeated maxims of “Proper Planning Prevents Poor Performance.” By the way, a lot of people attempt to correct me on that and add urine into that phrase. I’m familiar with the phrase, and no – urine is not part of that phrase at all. If you want to misquote it, that’s on you.
And of course, if you’ve been following me for any length of time, you know my other oft-quoted maxim, “Fail to Plan, Plan to Fail.”
Nobody needs to heed these words more than writers. Most writers are undisciplined, and resist the word “plan” in any sense of the word. If you can produce a high output of quality writing through pant’sing, fine. My experience is that most writers that pants their way through a novel take several years to do so.
It’s important to employ planning to every phase of the writer’s career, not just the novel writing process. I have fine-tuned my writing process to the point that I can now get from the novel planning process to writing “Chapter one” in three days – look at NaNoWriMo last year! Literally, the decision to do NaNo was made on Oct. 29th. I did the planning process not on the 29th, but on the 30th. I was writing Nov. 1.
The book was finished by Nov. 22.
How far should the planning process go with a writer? Once you have a book planning process that works for you (you can’t just borrow my system and expect it to work – if it doesn’t work for you, then you need one of your own), then you need a plan in place for your writers’ platform (I write all my writers’ platform information on Saturdays and Sundays – my schedule is going to change, so I’m going to have to adapt that slightly).
Then you need a plan in place for your editing and re-writes.
Then you need a plan in place for how long it’s going to take to get everything done.
Planning process for novel.
Writing novel.
Editing novel.
Writers’ platform maintenance.
Video book trailer.
Write synopsis.
Write query letter.
Get agent.
Get published.
Rinse. Lather. Repeat.
Now add 24 novels and 36 screenplays into the mix.
You need to get organized and now.
