Am I Planning Or Just Procrastinating?

“How do I know if my planning is actually just procrastinating now?”
“Should I stop planning and start writing?”
“Is my planning just a writing-avoidance behaviour?”

I get variations on these questions a lot. So, first off: for those of you who prefer not to plan and just dive in and start writing – go! Be free! You're allowed to do that! You can do the plotty-planning stuff in your redraft stage. Work the way that suits you.

Those of you who like to plan, at least some, before you write: you're allowed to plan. Usually, when someone asks, “Am I planning or just procrastinating?” they do actually know which, in their heart of hearts, but a few fears or anxieties are clouding their clarity:

• “Writing has to mean words on the page.”
• “I have to perfect the plan / world before I can start writing.”
• “I can’t start writing in case I get the words wrong.”

“Writing has to mean words on the page.”

It doesn't. Planning is part of the writing. It doesn’t mean you’re procrastinating: it’s part of the process. Not all parts of writing produce word count. (Read – or reread – Word Count Is Like Paint to set yourself free from the word-count trap.) And actually, everyone plans. Some plan first, then write. Some write, then redraft / plan afterwards.

So ask yourself, honestly, “Am I still busy with the planning or am I just nervous to write prose?” Often, when I discuss this with students, it turns out that they are still busy with the planning; they're just feeling like they “ought to have started already”. So here's a reassuring bit of info: when I start a new novel, whether this was back when I was ghost-writing or now, the first quarter of the time I spend on it is planning. These days, that's often three months of two writing days a week.

It’s fine to plan for as long as you need to. But be wary of thinking that…

“I have to perfect the plan / world before I can start writing.”

You don’t need a perfect plan. In fact, you can’t have a perfect plan: you’ll always learn more about the story, the world, and the characters through writing. Once, I did create a “perfect” plan: with my second ghost-writing novel, I was determined to be more efficient and planned every detail, down to each scene. Writing it was hell: there was nothing left to discover, no creative leaps, just an endless colour-by-number with words. It was also the worst novel I’ve written.

You want to leave yourself room to discover, invent, and have exciting creative leaps and “Aha!” moments in the writing. Those are often richer than what you could’ve consciously planned, because you learn your character / world / story so much more deeply through writing it. And remember, the person writing the story always knows it better than the person who planned it – so the writer gets to change the plan.

Likewise, some conundrums and mysteries are best solved through the writing. Sometimes you need to trust the process and leave things open: “Yes, I'm including the giant octopus. I don't know why, but I'm convinced it’s important.” Sometimes you can't know until the end whether it’s is an important detail or not. You might end up taking the giant octopus out. It might be the whole solution to the end.

Your plan doesn’t need to and can’t be perfect. It just needs to be enough that you can start writing. How detailed that is varies from person to person, so you need to trust yourself to know. In order to trust yourself, you also need to be sure you’re not thinking that…

“I can’t start writing in case I get the words wrong.”

Both things can be true: you can be still busy with the planning and nervous to write prose. Putting words on the page  can be scary, especially if the page is very very clean and you feel like the words you write now are The Words That Will Stay.

If you’re still planning and you’re nervous of the prose, write snippets. When you're planning, sometimes snatches of dialogue or brief bits of scene just come to you, unbidden: grab some fresh paper, and scribble them down while they're coming. Tuck them in a “snippets” folder. It's glorious, reaching that scene and finding your hasty drafts already written. That way you capture it when it's fresh, you know you're not afraid of writing prose because you're doing it, and you're not hurrying yourself past an important stage in your process.

If you honestly think you have finished planning, at least as much as you can for now, and you're just tinkering in case the words come out imperfect: write imperfect words. Write it badly, and fix it later. Honestly, we do that anyway, whether or not we intend to, so we may as well give ourselves the freedom of intending to. Scribble all over that clean clean page, and set about writing, badly, knowing you'll fix it later.

We’re not musicians on stage, trying to get everything right in one performance: we get to work in drafts. Rough out the action and add description later. Or write two pages of description because you need to know what everything looks like, then trim and interweave it later. Chuck down the dialogue and add the action later. Use boring familiar phrases which you’ll switch up for fresh ones later. Write in drafts, in layers. Include octopuses you might take out later.

*

Once you feel confident that you’re allowed to keep planning, that you don’t need a perfect plan before you start writing, that you can start writing alongside the planning, and that it’s fine to write imperfect first draft, then you can ask yourself “Am I planning or procrastinating?” And trust your own judgement.

If you want some help managing the strange mysterious process of planning, which can feel like mapping out mist, the Summer of Writing: Planning a Novel workshop will give you hands-on practical strategies, whether you’re starting from scratch or reworking raw draft. It’s in person in Oxford, full day, on Sat 9 August. Details and bookings are here; just 3 places left, so do be quick if you want to join it.

How Do I Write a Novel? An open letter to my younger self

When I wrote Word Count Is Like Paint, I realised that however sound the advice was, it would leave my younger self stranded. After all, how do you approach something as ambitious and amorphous as writing a novel, except with the one thing you can measure: word count? 

So this is my letter to that younger self, exactly half my age: she was having a kitchen-painting party for her birthday, in the photos below, so even our painting theme continues, and it's my birthday on Sunday, and I've just today finished my twelfth or thirteenth novel, depending how I count the two-volume one. And it's an open letter, because I thought you might find it useful, too.

Hey darling,

I know you’re longing to write a novel, you dream of being a novelist, and it seems as far off and unobtainable as being an astronaut. It’s not. You can totally do it and you don’t have to wait until some magic point of Readiness: you can start now.

First off, don’t worry about the words. I know it feels like that’s the main, most difficult thing, but really: you can do the words just fine. You’ve been inhaling novels since you learnt how to read. You know how the words go, in novels. The same way you learnt to speak, by being around people speaking? You’ve already learnt how to write.

You’ll get better and better at it, as time and writing go by, and you’ll discover exciting new things to do with style and words, but those are things you can only discover through writing – and what you’ve learnt from all that reading is more than enough to get started. Just go for it.

Writing a novel will take time and commitment, but you’ve already shown you’ve got that. Think of all your studying, the effort you put in – it’s like that, but this time with something that’s much more yours, that enthrals and delights you. It’s half commitment and half like falling in love, wanting to steal that time for it.

So you’ve got the commitment and you’ve got the words. You just need to know how to do it.

Here’s something that might surprise you and seem very obvious at the same time: the story is the main thing. Not how beautiful the words are. Not how important the Central Theme is. The story. None of your English teachers at school, none of your Eng Lit lecturers at uni, talked about novels as stories, ever, but that’s what they are. That’s why you read them. Even your favourite literary authors put the story first. The words have a job to do: to tell a story.

A novel is a substantial story, but not as long as you think. (Remember that 1500-word essay you were set? And you turned in 4500 words? Yeah. You don’t have a problem with writing too little.) But it’s substantial enough that you need to chunk it, both in story terms and your own progress.

Novels are measured in word count (I know that seems batshit, when words are such different lengths, but yes it works – they average out) and for your first novel, you should aim for 80k. I know you’ll overshoot. We want max 90k. (Trust me on this. This is very important. Do not spend ten years writing an absolute masterpiece that’s 330 000 words long. No-one will publish it, because they can’t; it’s too bloody long. Now matter how good it is. Just, y’know, a tip from the future.)

So aim for 80k. To make that manageable, chunk it into five parts; let’s call them acts. (I know your uni film course said three acts, but films are much shorter than novels, in story terms.) Make the first and last one about 10k words each, and the middle three about 20k words each. (Beginnings need to work fast and endings are often quicker than we expect, so those two get less.)

Don’t worry if that word count seems huge compared to the academic essays you’ve written. Fiction is much easier and chews up word count, because you don’t have to research or prove everything; you can just make it up. A good meaty scene with two characters actually doing stuff, somewhere interesting, and having an argument, can easily chew up 1500 words.

We’re using word count to measure the total size of the novel, and the approximate size of each act, but we’re not going to use it to measure progress. (That’s important. I’ll come back to that.) We’ll use the story to measure progress.

To do that, we need to map out the story across acts. Think of any story you know well. Lord of the Rings, if you want. (Btw, you’re going to meet someone who loves it as much as you do and you’ll get to introduce him to Terry Pratchett. Good things are coming.) What’s the main story line in that? Write that down in your notebook, in a sentence or two.

Now, what are the main points where things change, in that story line? For instance, the first one is when Gandalf tells Frodo he has to take the ring out the shire. Those change points are what mark the end of one act and the beginning of the next. You want four of those big change points (turning points) for the switch from one act to the next.

Your story also needs a thing that sets it going at the start (eg Bilbo giving Frodo the ring) – we call that the inciting incident, but it can also be the ongoing situation at the start. It doesn’t have to be massive, but it gets the story-ball rolling. And at the other end, an ending, which you might know before you start writing, or you might figure out much later.

You can map that out on one page of your notebook or a scrap of A6, to get going. Treat yourself to a coffee out, even a month of Saturday morning coffees if you want to keep brainstorming and coming up with ideas, but then dive in and start writing. You just need enough plan to give you a direction to write in. You’ll learn so much more about the story, and get to know the characters, through writing. And your plan will change, as you get to know it all better, and that’s fine – great, even. The initial plan is just your springboard.

Don’t get caught up in word count. I know I said 10k, then 3 x 20k, then 10k, but that’s a rough guide. I know you love spreadsheets, but try not to make a pie chart. Some acts are longer, or shorter. You might discover new change points, so your story has six acts, or seven, or ten. But you need some clarity, certainty, and structure to start with, so start with 5, and then be flexible.

I know what you want to know now, because you’re me: I stood shivering at those London bus stops with you, on the way to a temp job, leaden as the sky, notebook in our handbag, staring into the cosy coffee shop we couldn’t afford. How do I find The Idea? A good enough Idea, Worthy Of A Novel?

That’s the second thing your teachers and Eng Lit lecturers got completely wrong. And most of the world still gets wrong. The idea doesn’t matter. It does to you; it needs to, to you; but it doesn’t need to be Worthy, novel-length, or prize-winning. Ideas aren’t those things. It’s writing that grows ideas into novels, and the original idea can be lost as a seed-husk in the full-fleshed fruit. You don’t need to wait for The Idea. You just need an idea that will help you start writing. Everything grows from there.

It doesn’t need to be The Best Idea, either, because this won’t be your best novel. It’ll be your first, your best so far, but you’ll keep writing. Of course you will. So you’ll keep getting better.

All the idea needs to be is something that excites you to write. The way you keep thinking about sunsets. Or the creepy atmosphere of that field when the mist creeps over at night, which puts you in mind of witchery. Or the dreadful fog-horn sound of that misused amp and the description you’re writing of the building next to you. Small, such small, seed ideas that you’ll grow into novels by writing them.

I have so much more I could tell you. So much more I could advise. But most of it won’t make sense until you start writing. In fact, telling you all of it now would hold you back. Remember when you were 14 and you read every book the Wynberg municipal library had on writing? The car park’s hot tar and eucalyptus-tree smell wrapped through them? And how you couldn’t write for almost a year, because you knew too much about it but not how to do it? That’s why I can’t tell you the rest, now.

But I can tell you this: you can write a novel, and you can start now. The idea only needs to entice you; the rest will grow. The story matters more than the words, and you can do the words. Chunk the story into five acts, around change points, and use word count as a loose yardstick of story, not your metric. You can learn so much more when you’re writing, but you need to be writing.

And you can; you just needed to know how to get started. Now you do.

All my love,
Megan

Want to get started? Start writing your first-ever story or discover how to sort out a tricky section of your novel in just one hour, with the Essentials of Storytelling.

Click here to get started.

Word Count Is Like Paint

Say a novel is 90,000 words and you have three writing evenings a fortnight. Two of those fortnights you’re on holiday, so call it 24 fortnights a year. That gives you 72 writing evenings a year. So to write the novel in a year, you need to write 1250 words every writing evening. Cool. Sounds doable. Let’s g–

HOLD IT RIGHT THERE. Word count is like paint.

This September, Will and I set about repainting the living room. We knew the size of the walls, and they all needed to be covered in paint, so measuring our progress in inches of paint would be reasonable, right? Our 30 square meters worked out as 46,500 inches of paint. We wanted to finish it in two days, so call each day eight hours, so we’d each need to paint 1,453 inches an hour. Cool. Sounds doable. Let’s go.

Will, wielding the roller, had a great painting day! He did loads! Me, going around with the cutting-in brush – I didn’t do nearly so well. Very few inches indeed. I guess I’m just a slower painter.

That was the afternoon, though. Actually, we both had a terrible painting morning. We were vacuuming walls, sugar soaping, dusting behind radiators, moving furniture, laying paint sheets – classic PAB (Painting Avoiding Behaviour) amiright? Not an inch of paint applied. Disaster.

Yeah, yeah, without that, we’d get paint clagging up with invisible spider webs and dust bunnies, paint peeling where there were grease marks, paint spattered on the sofa and floor, yadda yadda yadda… Pfft. Just excuses. Just putting off getting started. Painting nerves, right?

The next day, sadly, when we moved onto painting the skirting boards, dado rail, and cornices, Will’s painting streak evaporated. He actually did even fewer inches than me. While I got on with the business of getting paint on surfaces, you know, actually painting, he procrastinated, faffing about with “caulking” then “letting it dry”, he was “rehanging curtains”, “rehanging paintings”, “taking up paint sheets”, “carrying furniture”, “cleaning the roller”… He probably had some kind of Painter’s Block, right?

Obviously, this is absurd. The prep is essential. Clean-up is essential. Painting with a roller (province of Will’s long reach) is wildly different to cutting in edges and trimmings (province of my steady hand). Will’s expertise with caulking is a lot better than hurriedly bodging paint into the gaps, and of course it needs to dry before it’s painted. Of course the room needs to be put back together. While we want every inch painted, we can’t measure progress by inches painted. That would be unhinged.

It’s exactly the same with writing and word count. We know roughly how many words we ultimately want, for a short story or a novel, but we can’t measure our progress in word count. Any more than we can measure our painting in inches.

Here are just some of the important writing activities that don’t add word count, add it very slowly, or actually subtract it:

• Researching things that’ll change the plot shape (eg a particular law for a court case)
• Researching details that’ll make it convincing (eg when a crescent moon is visible)
• Deep-dive brainstorming stuff you need to make up (eg the food / market for your world)
• Deep-dive planning crucial info (eg currency for a story where money matters)
• Reworking a first-draft scene to be less clichéd / adverby in its second draft
• Reworking a second-draft scene in response to feedback on characterisation, logistical details, etc
• Cutting a scene’s tangents to make it pacier
• Turning chunks of exposition into detail drip-fed through existing scenes
• Editing generic words (eg “tree”) into specific words (eg “mangrove”)
• Creating a plot map or tension map (at the start, in the middle, or to rework the story)
• Refining the opening / ending lines of scenes and chapters to enhance narrative tension
• Revising a character’s dialogue to make it more their voice
• Rereading the whole story to assess it for redrafting
• Creating an overview by chapter
• Identifying plot holes and issues
• Resolving plot holes and issues
• Moving scenes and tweaking them for their new position
• Making a spreadsheet of the timing / calendar across the story
• Cutting paragraphs, scenes, even chapters
• Fine-grain editing of the near-final draft

Unlike painting, there isn’t One Right Order to do these. You don’t have to plan before you start putting down words. A lot of those things happen alongside, between, or after the activities that do increase word count – but note that I don’t say alongside, between, or after the writing. They’re all part of the writing. Just like everything Will and I were doing was part of the painting.

A lot of gung-ho writing advice says “Just get the words down!” I also say, “Write it badly, you can fix it later.” But fixing it later is part of the writing, whether that’s at the end of the scene, the chapter, the story, however you prefer to work. So is planning, if you need to know where the story’s going before you start getting words down. So is reworking, so is research, so is editing, so is all of it.

They’re not “writing nerves”, WAB (Writing Avoiding Behaviour), procrastination, or Writer’s Block: they are writing. And rather than being a sign that you’re “scared of doing the writing”, they make you a lot braver about writing. How much easier is it to rough out first draft when you know you’ll sort out the details later? And how much easier is it to sort out the details when you’re not beating yourself up for “not writing”?

You can have a brilliant, incredibly successful, deeply valuable writing session that doesn’t increase the word count at all. You are not Lorem Ipsum: your purpose is not word count. You are a person: your purpose is a wonderful story.

If you want to read more about breaking free of the wordcount-goal trap, read this tip: Set time not goals and this article: The Joy Is In the Doing. And if you're not sure how to set about writing a novel without using word count as your main guide, read How Do I Write a Novel? An open letter to my younger self.

Should I Just Give Up Writing My Novel?

It’s a fair question. Writing a novel takes a lot of time and dedication. Some people will rush in to say “Nooo! Never give up!” But if you’re asking, it deserves consideration. Maybe that specific novel is something you’re ready to ditch; maybe it’s become an albatross around your neck. You don’t have to carry on if you don’t want to. It doesn’t make you a quitter.

Or maybe you’re having a standard creative crisis point, the ones every writer and creative gets, but you don’t know about those yet. And if you ditch this one, the next project will reach the same crisis points – precisely because they are standard.

It’s not a question I can answer for you. But I can pose the questions which will help you decide and I can tour you through the standard crisis points you might be having.

Mapping Out Mist

The Chaos of Art

The thing we’re creating doesn’t yet exist.
We’re sat in the mud pit, banging our rocks
and shouting at flowers. Suddenly adult, insist
on a Timeframe of Output, firm, at a desk,
mapping out… mist. We can’t yet exist
in such untrammelled time. Thought-barges collide,
now huge in the fog, already. A list?
We detail the tips of our icebergs and teeter,
the swaying unseen bulk dismissed,
placating the busying Protestant mind
while we grow things that don’t yet exist.

I wrote that in 2023, while I was planning a new novel and also the Planning A Novel workshop. It’s a strange business, planning things that don’t exist, which also can’t exist without a bit of planning. You might have an exciting heap of ideas (as I did with the workshop) or reams of first draft (as I did with the novel). It has a definite existence in potentia, but… well, it doesn’t exist.

I plan a lot of things that don’t exist. Novels, courses, workshops. Every year, when I find out the two new Summer of Writing workshops, I set about writing the workshop descriptions: a line or two introducing the topic, fine; a paragraph of what we’ll cover, cool; and then a paragraph beginning “By the end of this workshop, you’ll have…” My brain skids to a halt so fast it leaves tyre tracks.

How can I possibly say that? I don’t know! The workshop doesn’t exist yet! I haven’t made it! I frown, scribble, cross out, panic, go for a walk. At some point, in the next day or two, my brain will leap forward confidently and declare, “Come on, it’s easy. If you went on a workshop described like that, what would you expect to have done by the end? Cos that’s probably what that bit should be? Duh.” And I briskly scribble that final line.

I’ve tried writing down that sage impatient advice, for future years, but it doesn’t work. I still need the “frown, scribble, cross out, panic, go for a walk” routine. Somewhere in that process, I’m working it out: mapping out mist.

Fog

Fires, canal-side grey. The
faint sparks drown in air. Light
fades and swells, ballooning
flimsy round a lost lamp.
Follow the path – but it’s gone.
Feel for barbed, bare hawthorn:
find where escaped thoughts hide.

The frown-scribble-crossing-out bit is feeding your brain all the puzzles you want it to solve. The moments that you’re walking, or staring out the window, thinking you’re not thinking but actually thinking very hard, are often the most productive. But you also need to capture all those mist-emerging thoughts, and order them so you can find them again. But how do you order something which has no order, because, again, it doesn’t exist yet? And you can’t have too much order, too soon: you need to keep the possibilities open.

Focus

Fixed stare – at nothing – I
float: the brambles have spread…
folding origami
flowers with unseen hands…
Focus! But as my dreams
flit, I see their work: they
fix what I’m not watching.

That’s wild mental work. During this work, I often painstakingly devise the exact thing I need to help me capture ideas. To draw these felt-tip rectangles, it would help to have a straight edge – a piece of cardboard, perhaps? I could mark the length and height of the rectangles on the cardboard, so they’d all be the same. Something firm enough to press a felt-tip against, with regular units of measurement I’d have to create… Oh, look, I’ve invented the ruler. Well done, me.

These pieces of paper: they belong together. But their order might change: I can’t staple them. I need something like a staple, but which I can easily put on and take off. Something that slides on, instead of piercing the paper. Perhaps, with a longer length of thin metal than a staple, I could twist it to fashion some kind of… Oh. I’ve invented paperclips. Again. I’m the Elon Musk of stationery.

When your mind is that full of half-seen story, you become simultaneously absolutely brilliant and very stupid. It helps to have stationery, for a start. A lot of stationery, if only to save yourself the trouble of inventing it from first principles. I’ve gradually learnt to add all the relevant stationery to my writing bag. For the first Planning A Novel workshop, I put in my biggest ever order, to create what we variously termed the “stationery villages” or “non-stationary stationery”:

And alongside the stationery, techniques. Over the years, and some eleven or so novels, I've worked out principles and processes, strategies that now seem as simple as paperclips. I lay my notes on those next to me, alongside the paperclips, the post-its, the slide-binders and felt-tips. I know that even though I haven't yet mapped out this mist, I have the tools of my creative cartography right there: the approaches for how to map out mist.

Esoteric problems often have deliciously simple solutions. "This is how you join pieces of paper you'll later re-order." "This is how you turn a series of brick story walls into things you can explore." "This is how you free your mind to work on one piece of the puzzle, without the whole Jenga-tower of thought falling down." Because if you can sort out the practicalities, the rest of your head is free for the esoteric. We need both: the simple solutions, and the respect for the esoteric, the seemingly-invisible work we’re doing.

And as you veer between the mapping and the mist, in strange ways, with a lot of apparently mindless staring at starlings and some seemingly pre-school-style Busyness With Felt-Tips, you’re conjuring up something that will, and increasingly does, exist.

Lapse

Light slips, between soft sounds:
loose as humming, it’s a
lilt of a moment, mind,
life – a caesura in
liturgy: we forget
lists, briefly, slide into
liquid thoughts, lipid ways.

The Planning A Novel workshop is running on 9 August 2025 in Oxford, exploring how to support all those strange kinds of thinking, heaps of practical solutions, and a truckload of lovely stationery. You can see the complete list of workshops, past reviews, and how to book here.