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.

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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.

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.