Ever seen a person getting caught for some bumbling, amateur burglary on the local news?
It never seems to go down like the sophisticated heists you see in movies.
The difference between a professional crew of thieves and the guy picking a lock right
in front of a home security camera is the plan.
Plans get a bad rap in writing, partly due to how they’re used in school.
Some people feel like plans rein in their creativity, and others think they’re not
worth the trouble, since they could “just start writing.”
However, a good writing plan can reduce our anxiety for the rest of the writing project
and, like a good scheme for a heist, set us up for success.
A helpful plan is one that’s tailored to our own needs, rather than just making a generic
plan because someone told us to.
I can’t in good conscience recommend any kind of heists, but with the right planning
techniques, you can write more efficiently, more effectively, and feel less stress.
We’ll learn how to do that today in Study Hall: Composition, presented by
Arizona State University and Crash Course.
I’m Yumna Samie, let’s get started.
After we finish invention, or creating ideas for a writing project, planning is the next step.
A writing plan isn’t a contract or a blueprint, it’s more of a trail map with several hiking
paths.
It’s not rigid, but it helps us understand the nature of our project and gives us concrete
steps for getting where we want to go.
Teachers do their best to teach planning, like by assigning a graded outline as part
of a writing project.
But one side effect of making planning a graded part of a writing assignment is that it is
sometimes more useful to the teacher than to the student.
So for you, it can become a performance, something focused more on what the audience,
your teacher in this case,
wants to see, and not focused on what you need to work through for yourself.
Some people spend too much time making outlines they end up ignoring, and others write the
paper and make an outline from that, just to get “full credit.”
Those aren’t helpful plans.
Skipping the planning step, or doing it as an afterthought, plays into that frustrating
“lone genius” model of writing.
That model assumes that inspiration strikes people at random.
That’s how planning looks in those heist movies:
one person laments that there are 3 security guards by the vault at any given time,
and suddenly a teammate’s eyes go wide,
they shout, “I’ve got it!” and they start flipping through blueprints of the building’s
air vents.
However, in many classes and work environments, we won’t get inspiration from thin air,
but we won’t have anyone asking for our planning documents, either.
So we can use an outline if we want, or we can plan in other ways.
To do this, rather than thinking of these heist movies or school assignments, when planning
we should think of ourselves as project managers.
In your workplace, you may have these folks.
They recognize all the work that needs to be done, all the resources we have to get
it done, and then they match the resources to the work and give the work an order.
They notice what parts of the process should, say, be done in the library, and which aspects
of the project should definitely be done before Tuesday
because Janet is going on vacation the next day.
This project manager job isn’t glamorous…
I mean unless maybe you are project managing a diamond theft…
Anyway, the point is that most of us can be project managers, even when we aren’t feeling
inspired.
Let’s see an example of how planning a writing project has serious elements of project management
with this look at a Writer in Action.
Gregoire is part of the writing team for a new action movie, Taming the Giant Squid.
Everyone is excited about the many ideas they’ve suggested for the story.
However, it is becoming apparent that what they have is a bunch of half-formed scenes,
not a beginning, middle, and end of a movie.
Gregoire puts his project manager hat on to begin the planning process.
He starts a list on the whiteboard in the writers’ room, writing down each task in
what he thinks is chronological order.
When Paula points out that someone needs to do a deep-dive on giant squid mobility before
they write the fight scene, he erases it and moves it earlier up in the list.
Gregoire also draws sketches of all the exciting half-formed scenes that the team has come
up with.
As they discuss, he numbers the scenes to sequence them.
He notices a gap between the scene on the high seas where they catch the squid and the
team’s arrival at the Georgia Aquarium to meet with the biologists.
He adds a filler scene to the list, and the writers start to see a more fully-formed narrative
arc.
They’ll tweak the plan over time, but right now everyone feels empowered to get to work.
They don’t stare at the empty whiteboard hoping for a plot to appear or worse,
start writing the script and get stuck when they get to that fight scene and have no idea
how powerful squid tentacles are by bodyweight.
Instead, they work so efficiently that there’s time for some giant squid YouTubing to unwind
at the end of the workday.
Gregoire is a Writer in Action!
Gregoire showed us that planners can create the circumstances that lead to great writing.
Let’s talk about how we can achieve similar great results.
The start of planning is always figuring out what we need to accomplish.
When we begin writing, we don’t know if it will be a 10 hour or a 50 hour project.
By breaking it down, we learn what “write a movie” or “finish this report” really
looks like.
We break it down into steps:
I need to pull the budget reports for 2015 through 2018,
or I need to finish reading the schematics for the diamond vault,
or I need to refine the potential romantic subplot for this squid movie.
It’s also where we start to define what the scope, or the extent and complexity, of
the project will be.
Does my boss expect me to compare our performance to that of the top competitor, or to everyone
who shares our market?
Knowing what qualifies as “enough” can really help us avoid scope creep, where we
overwhelm ourselves by going into unnecessary, time-consuming detail.
Then we figure out how to put those smaller steps in an order that works for us.
Recursivity, or repeating a process over and over, also comes into play.
This is true for the Writing Process overall, but it applies to planning in particular.
You know how most fun heist movies have an unexpected explosion or tool malfunction that
sends the team back to the drawing board?
Similarly, when we get stuck while writing, we’ll return to the plan and adjust it.
Our plan is not a rocket ship that we’re strapped to; it’s a first best guess as
to how things are gonna go.
And the best plans are flexible, meaning we can change them as needed without having to
start completely from scratch.
Basically, remember this: our plan works for us, we don’t work for our plan.
Let’s get down to the nitty-gritty: Three ways that we like to plan include list-making,
mind mapping, and outlines.
List-making is also an inventional strategy, a way to generate lots of ideas before writing.
When we use lists for planning purposes, they can be a series of steps that we need to accomplish,
or a list of sections or parts of the writing project.
Lists let us get a sequence going,
but they also let us make adjustments early when we realize that our writing project won’t
work the way we expected.
If you initially think that the project will be only a few paragraphs long,
but your list already has ten essential items on it,
your list is helping you understand that the scope of your project may need to change.
You may need to write a longer paper or trim back the least-necessary steps from your list.
An extremely short list helps you recognize you might want to seek clarity from a boss
or professor before you start writing and get stuck.
Lists help us prevent problems, but we can always come back to them and change them later,
if we need to.
Another way to plan is to use a mind map.
Unlike lists, mind maps organize information visually so they engage our brains differently.
To make a mind map, write your project’s central point or question in the middle of
a piece of paper and draw a circle around it.
Next, draw lines coming out of the circle and write down concepts that lead to your
main point:
examples you need to include to prove your central argument or topics that need to be
covered to answer your question.
You should circle each of these, and then you can draw more “spokes” out of those
circles
to add more details that must be mentioned in order to get to those intermediary points.
Then throw some circles around those, too.
I know, it’s a lot of circles.
But the size of the circle gives an implicit “weight” to an item, which helps us decide
what we’re going to write about when.
Mind maps also send us back to the drawing board sometimes:
if one secondary circle has a zillion spokes of ideas coming off of it, maybe that is actually
what you want to write about.
You can always draw another map that centers on that.
Lastly, we’ll say it: outlining can be really beneficial!
Think of it like a list, but with different tiers of ideas that depend on each other.
Like if a list and a mind map had a baby.
There are many ways to outline, and some of them really help people.
Unfortunately, a lot of outlining comes with restrictive rules, and we don’t want to
get into that here-
the rules don’t always benefit the writer, especially when we are writing a lot of different
kinds of projects.
What we want to make sure you do know, however, is that if you plan on using an outline,
that’s great!
Just make sure the outline style you use benefits you and your writing.
Planning offers us a chance to feel more confident that we understand our projects, even though
we don’t have to set in stone exactly how it will all work out.
Here are some lessons to hold onto:
First, planning involves asking ourselves two questions: what do we need to accomplish,
and in what order are we going to do those tasks?
Second, the act of planning is helping you organize connections in your mind.
You may not need to constantly look at your plan to know what to do next,
but you should have a clearer idea of what’s to come because you did take the time to plan.
Finally, remember that your plan should be flexible, since you’ll probably make changes to it.
That’s a normal part of the planning stage.
Don’t give up on your writing equivalent of a multi-million dollar take.
Make a plan, follow your plan, change your plan, and remember:
We don’t condone heists, though if they happen, they should probably still be well-planned.
In our next video, we’ll talk through what drafting is and techniques that will help
you generate the core components of your writing project.
Thanks for watching Study Hall: Composition, which is produced by Arizona State University
and the Crash Course team at Complexly.
If you liked this video and want to keep learning with us here in Study Hall, be sure to subscribe.
You can learn more about ASU and the videos produced by Crash Course in the links in the
description.
See you next time!