We Have Big Plans… And They’ll Have to Get Bigger

If a little planning is good, then a lot of planning should be great, right? And you know what would be best of all? All. The. Planning.

Except, no. There is such a thing as too much planning. It’s not a catastrophe if it happens, but it can create some headaches. As we recently discovered. (Spoiler: we’d say the problems you get with overplanning are better ones to have than what you get with underplanning.)

As regular blog readers know, we outlined all four Ghost Books at once. We wanted to know where the plot is going, and be able to do nifty thematic stuff and foreshadowing. Great. In the process, we did end up creating a problem for ourselves, which we’ve discovered now that we’re closing in on the end of book one.

There’s a very fancy prop — think priceless magical heirloom — that gets used prominently in the first book and then is never mentioned at all in the outlines of the later volumes. We think we’ve figured out how it happened. During the outlining, we thought of this item as more of an aesthetic element, something that added spice to a few early scenes but wouldn’t really be missed later on. During the creation of the actual prose, it became nifty-keen in ways we hadn’t anticipated, becoming something that we couldn’t just stop mentioning. Anyway, we caught it and we can easily (we hope) tweak the future outlines to factor it in.

Given that what we’re saying is we missed some stuff, it might not be obvious how this  represents overplanning. But it was. We just planned out a few too many books all at once. We didn’t apply to the outlining process the lessons we’ve learned about stubs. There’s a reason we do our stubs in batches, which is so that we can course-correct as we go. So, now we’ll have to course-correct anyway. No big deal. Much easier to fix outlines than completed manuscripts!

The take-away is this: there’s an optimal amount of planning, and it’s probably better to do a little too much than not enough.