Stuck in the Planning Stage

I’m forever more a planner when I write. Perhaps not down to the minute detail, and certainly my plans change as I go along, but I like to have a basic outline of plot events and thematic points that I expect the story to take up. I make long documents for planning, pages and paragraphs and questions to myself in a long litany. These planning documents are half journal, half tracing of the plot, a dumping ground for cuts from the drafting document which almost never see the light of day again. Sometimes my planning document grows longer than the story itself.

Sometime this spring, though I don’t have a specific date, I’ve got a story coming out in J Journal, a story which has had huge transformations since I began writing it in earnest in January 2019. As I currently wile away time on planning in my current project, I am taking a look back, to trace through that planning document the development of an idea. Maybe there will be some insights in the process.

In reality, the story of this story, “I Dream of This Tree,” goes back longer. It was an idea I had back in… it would have been 2012, the summer after I had returned from a year as a teaching assistant in Germany, before I did my US student-teaching that would finalize my teaching license. I had a terrible relationship with writing in those years: my dreams of penning brilliant stories had been bludgeoned by painful feedback I had received on my final story collection from college, what I had seen as my masterpiece. I took that professor’s words so personally, I stopped writing almost completely for two years.

The idea of a northern Minnesota cabin, in which the cut wood begins to grow again, reassert itself as a tree, to grow roots and leaves and threaten to undermine the structural integrity of the cabin, this came to me as part of a desperate desire to start writing again. I held that idea close to me and spun out branches and leaves and plans. I wrote a few paragraphs–then I got stuck. I hated what I was writing. It was as terrible as everything I had done in college, and I was kidding myself, I thought, if I thought I could take an idea and turn it into a reader-worthy piece of fiction. I shelved it, and the tree kept sleeping.

I dug the idea back out again six and a half years later. In that intervening time, I had slowly built up my intention to keep trying with writing, had worked painstakingly through a novel, and now I wanted to try short stories, as a way to build up a portfolio for applying to MFA programs.

It’s a common lament on Twitter’s #WritingCommunity that as soon as one gets going on a project, ten more ideas clamor for attention. Current works-in-progress (WiPs) are forever at the mercy of these shiny, new ideas. It’s a similar chorus in my knitting group, with whom, blessedly, I have reconnected during these Corona times for once-a-week Zoom sessions: “I just had to start that Spangle Shawl,” someone will say, “never mind the five other projects I’ve got going on!”

This has never been my problem–quite the reverse. I think I have a one-track mind. Whatever project I am working on, it fills my writing brain completely. I find it so difficult to think about other stories while I’m writing one–the momentum refuses to release me into a new project. So coming off the novel, how was I to embark on something new, and something in a new form that felt so alien after the novel’s expansive scope? Thus I returned to an idea that I already had had, to that budding and insurgent tree.

From the planning document:

Andrew arrives at the cabin to spend a week alone during summer. He’s a teacher and has summers off.
Power is out in the cabin – he spends the first night in the dark.
Next day, goes to investigate.

Andrew, eating breakfast, sees a leaf in the top of the cabin.
Determines the wood in the cabin is still growing.
Realizes this could explain the power outage and the influx of mosquitos.
Calls home, alerts husband Tim, but phone is low on batteries – he’ll have to wait for news.
Tim will call power company.

I read through the above, and I notice things about myself–the plan is entirely plot-focused. It has elements of the autobiographical (teacher, husband who is much better at dealing with logistical problems than me), and elements of the ideal (how I would love to have a cabin I could escape to in the woods!).

I also look at this brief outline of the story opening for what I know will change, which is nearly everything. I tried writing out the scene described. I got a few paragraphs with some beautiful imagery, and I still have them, languishing in my planning document, to languish on forever now. I recognize too what continues to be a real sticking point for me in my writing: while my instinct is to develop stories with subtle conflicts, to avoid the sturm and drang of sensational action in favor of show development and largely internal conflicts of everyday proportions, I recognize that prevailing ideas about what literature should be (and, to be frank, some of my own reading tastes!) privilege high conflict with burning stakes.

The story changed significantly in the following weeks. The planning document charts my course towards sharper conflict, then the major decision to move the story into historical fiction. Paging through my plans, I see the thought processes laid bare, but also the fits and starts and frustrations that I pecked out on the keyboard as a way to pass the time. The birthing of a story is inelegant. It is a swamp where it is easy to get stuck. Sometimes for weeks at a time, I am mired in the planning stage, seeking that new idea that will set me free.

Eventually, I completed the story, and then, later, I reworked it in light of my growing consciousness of anti-racism, working with the amazing poet Chavonn Williams Shen as a sensitivity reader. That part of the story’s journey I have written about in this post, and if you are interested in learning about how fiction writers might approach social justice work in our writing, especially when we write characters with different identities to our own, I encourage you to read it.

I sit now in another period of planning, for the writing project I’ve been crafting since November. I have reached a turning point, and from here on out, I have only the vaguest plans. It’s been a week. I’m not sure that I’m getting anywhere, and my monthly writing goal for May is ticking away.

So I am trying to remember that this is the process that has brought me to stories that I am proud of, this weaving, fretting, stopping, rereading, moping, grasping–I’ll get there.

This weekend, I have been participating in a two-day kayak course with students, getting basic training so that I can take others out on trips on the fjord. It is freezing. Today, there was rain and hail and just a teasing bit of sun. I was alright until we tipped into the water, to practice helping one another get back into our boats. The water is 4°C (39°F) from residual snowmelt. I don’t think I have ever been so cold in my life. But of course it is worth it. Seeing the water from that low angle, distant mountains illuminated fiercely through wandering clouds, the million expanding rings as the hail slams down into the water–there is something marvelous about the inability to go inside when the weather throws itself at you. You just have to watch it. It really is weather, atmosphere, motion. A few hours later now, my fingers have loosened up enough to type the last part of this post.

Thanks for stopping by, and best wishes for the week ahead. Keep writing.
Jimmy