The Lady, the Block, and the Breakthrough: How I Stopped Planning My Way Out of Writing

I have a writing partner. Let’s call her Lady Writesalot.

Lady Writesalot is driving me crazy. Not because she’s a bad writing partner. Quite the opposite! She’s excellent. I beta read for her, we share a lot about our work, and she’s an unstoppable writing machine. She starts books. She finishes books. Then she starts more books.

And I’m jealous. There, I said it.

I’m reading her books, and she’s not reading mine, because I don’t have anything new for her to read. I have multiple projects I’ve put on hold, and I’ve spent an awful lot of time thinking about writing without actually finishing the writing.

Meet Virtual Boy

I’ve been calling my current manuscript Virtual Boy. That’s a codename, not its real title. I’m hoping to pursue traditional publication, so I’m keeping the project itself under wraps for now.

The frustrating part is that I had a really good idea for this book a year and a half or two years ago. I had a strong shape for the story. At one point I had eleven solid chapters. I started dictating more months ago, and I did some work on the structure, but I couldn’t maintain consistent forward progress.

I tried giving myself an hour a day. I tried dictating for an hour a day. I kept developing writing methods—which, honestly, may be part of my problem. I was also fascinated by the idea of long-running stories, the kind of story engine that can keep a manga or a Shonen Jump series going, with arcs and payoffs and room to grow.

And there I was, trying to work out the ideal way to build and sustain a story when I already had a story sitting right in front of me.

Lady Writesalot’s Ridiculous Advice

Lady Writesalot told me she just writes whenever she can. Even if it’s one sentence at a time.

I thought that sounded crazy. How can you write a book one sentence at a time? That’s nuts!

Then I tried it.

And suddenly I’m knocking out chapters. I’m dropping bodies over here—in a literary fashion, of course.

Sometimes I finish a chapter before my kids head off to school. Sometimes it’s nine or ten in the morning. Sometimes I’m working until 11:15 at night, exhausted, because that’s when I managed to get it done. And sometimes I finish one chapter, get a little more writing in later, and find myself halfway into the next.

The thing is, dictation does something for me that I wasn’t really taking advantage of before. As I’m speaking, I’m thinking. As I’m moving through a scene, another idea occurs to me. That idea produces another one. I don’t have to know every detail before I start talking. Sometimes I discover the best material because I started.

The Outline Is a Map, Not a Set of Handcuffs

Now, I should be clear: I haven’t thrown planning away. I have a roughly fifty-chapter outline. For each chapter, I’ve thought about the challenge the characters face, what I want to change, and the hook that pushes the story forward.

When I’m ready to draft, I skim the previous chapter. What was I trying to accomplish? What actually happened? Where did I leave the reader hanging? A good chapter-ending hook often propels me straight into the next chapter.

Then I look at the outline, and I start dictating.

And sometimes I go completely off the outline! I figure I’ve replaced about six planned chapters with chapters that came to me while I was writing. I don’t want to pretend I’ve kept a precise tally. The point is that the book is changing, and in ways I think are making it better.

At one point I followed a training-sequence idea that took me two or three chapters in a direction I hadn’t planned. I had practically written myself into a corner. In the old days, that might have sent me backward to revise everything, or into another long planning session.

Instead, I kept going. And when I finished Chapter 38, I found myself perfectly positioned to dovetail into the idea I’d already planned for Chapter 39.

That felt amazing. I knew roughly where I wanted to go, trusted myself to write forward, and the story found a way to connect.

Twenty Chapters Later

I started this recent push with eighteen chapters finished and Chapter 19 partway done. I’ve now finished Chapter 19 and drafted Chapters 20 through 38. That’s twenty chapter completions, including nineteen entirely new chapters.

Some days I’ve written two. I’ve been getting close to a chapter a day across my six writing days a week. I wish I could give you a perfect, tidy streak, but there have been missed days and late nights, and I haven’t kept the kind of exact log that would make a perfect statistic. The pages are real, though.

Finishing a chapter feels so good that it’s almost addicting. Sometimes, as soon as I’m done, I want to do it again. Let’s go. Another chapter. Another payoff. Another discovery.

And the more I write, the better the book gets. The story gets richer. Emotional connections emerge. Setups start paying off. I even recognized something significant that had been sitting in my structure all along, but I hadn’t seen it until I began drafting. Now I can emphasize it and build toward it. That’s something I might have to write about another time.

There’s a less flattering side, too. I’ve started feeling embarrassed when I miss a chapter. That’s probably something I need to watch. I don’t want to replace one system that kept me from writing with a new system that punishes me for having a life.

But I can’t deny how happy I am to be moving. After carrying this book around in my head for so long, I’m making meaningful progress on it almost every day.

The Breakthrough

I think my method now is to start with a cool premise and enough story engine to sustain an initial arc. Know some big moments I want to reach. Get that first arc conceptually solid. Then write the thing, and let the writing show me what else is possible.

I still value planning. I’ve done a lot of it, and some of it has been useful. But eventually I was planning my way out of writing. I needed to stop asking how to make the whole book better before I wrote the next chapter, and start writing the next chapter so I could find out how to make the whole book better.

I want to finish Virtual Boy, get it into the traditional publishing pipeline, and then bring this momentum back to other projects, including the next Grobugs book. Those projects have different purposes for me, and that’s a conversation for another day.

For now, I keep coming back to something simple: this book is no longer just a good idea, a plan, or a story I’ve been carrying around for years. I’m turning it into something another person can actually read.

And that feels fantastic.