Bradley, Marion Zimmer. Getting Started: Planning and Plotting the Novel. Creative Writing in America.

Zimmer Bradley starts with the same advice most of the authors of these chapters have given: If you want to be a creative writer, you simply have to do it. She advises always moving forward: "I never work with old manuscripts: I have (students) start a new one, using the techniques they're learning. The first exercise is to write a first sentence that will lead to a story which will hook the editor and be rejection-proof. The old manuscript? If it were any good it would have sold. Put it away, and if it's a good story, use it later when you've learned what is wrong with it" (115). In other words, most of the learning of writing is in continuing to try with new material. Revision is important, but you can't keep tooling with a work that wasn't that strong to begin with -- you have to move forward, with your new knowledge of craft techniques, and make the next work better.

Unlike other writers, Zimmer Bradley is a huge proponent of planning: "getting the work, essentiall, all done at once, so I only had to sit down and write it. I did the same thing with The Mists of Avalon; people say they were astonished that it took me a mere eight months to write after I had finished the research, but basically, the hard part was alredy done -- the actual work of putting it on paper should be the fun part" (115-116). This is so much what I do in my composition classes -- this is how I've been TRAINED to teach composition -- but I'm surprised to see it stated here. Again, it shows that skills learned in either type of writing can be transferred if it works for the writer.

"...you can, of course, skip it. You can just start writing, with no idea where you are going, or wh, and some day you'll have a novel. You can do it that way -- if you have a well-trained subconscious which does all that work for you. But it's easier to learn how to do it consciously.

"This is the way all too many writers do their work. Why not? You can skip all this part -- and it will eventually be done by the subconscious. This works, usually, if you don't mind writer's block, waiting a year or two while your subconscious grapples with something else, or having your deepest darkest secrets become obvious in your novels. But why not do it the easy way? Plan it all out ahead" (116).

I see both the good and the bad in this. I admit that there have been stories and even a novel that I've never finished because I just didn't know how to, and perhaps a plan would have helped that. But I worry that the work would not have progressed naturally and sounded stilted. Even in the novel I'm writing now, I don't know what its actual conclusion will be. Chapters seem to reveal themselves to me as I go, though, and I do find doing some craft exercises or sketches of scenes on paper does seem to help when I type the chapters out, and gives me some direction. So planning is helping me, sort of!