Flying with a Plan

I’ve always been a planner. In business, in life, and inevitably in writing. But planning a book turned out to be a different discipline — not spreadsheets and forecasts, but something more fluid: building a world with its own logic, movement, and emotional weight.

Before this project, I had already attempted two novels. Both fully outlined, both serious efforts, both quietly put on hold when 90,000 words of complexity became too heavy to carry. It wasn’t failure so much as a recognition: I wasn’t yet ready to manage that scale. I needed a smaller canvas to learn on. Somewhere to finish something without being crushed by it.

So I chose a novella.

Working title: Chip Stealing Bastards
Actual title: The Art of Stealing Chips in the Mizzle
Three acts. Around fifty scenes. One paragraph of intention for each.

It felt achievable. Contained. A story I could hold.

People sometimes assume planning makes fiction rigid or predictable. I’ve found the opposite. Planning was deeply creative — like writing the book once in miniature. Instead of 500 words per scene, I wrote a few sentences. Just enough to capture direction and energy. The story still shifted and argued. Characters misbehaved. Better ideas pushed earlier ones aside.

Planning wasn’t a cage. It was rehearsal.

And then I wrote it.
Fifty scenes. Roughly 500 words each. About sixty days.
For the first time, I reached the end of a long-form project. Not perfect, but whole. There is a particular quiet satisfaction in typing a final line and knowing you stayed with it.

What surprised me was what came next.

I assumed polishing meant tidying. In reality, it meant learning a new craft. Going back to the beginning and reliving the story, only deeper. Sharper. More honest. I discovered where the work really happens:

Character voice
Early drafts blurred together. I used personality frameworks to separate and define voices — giving each character a distinct rhythm, instinct, and worldview.

Agency
Moments where the story happened to my protagonist needed changing. He had to drive events, not drift through them. Action → choice → consequence → growth. In one revision, a death that was once accidental became the direct result of another character’s decision — and the story gained weight instantly.

Foreshadowing and thematic threads
Planting meaning early so later moments land harder. A detail introduced in scene one earns its place when it echoes in scene seven.

Sensory grounding
Letting the world breathe: weather, smell, texture, light.

Language discipline
Staying true to perspective. Removing words and concepts the characters wouldn’t understand. Committing fully to the world’s logic.

Line craft
Rhythm. Clarity. Precision. Learning to hear sentences, not just write them.

Planning gave me the confidence to start. Finishing a draft taught me persistence. But revision — revision taught me how to write.

It has taken far longer than I imagined. It has demanded more attention than I thought I had. And slowly, page by page, the story is becoming what it wanted to be.

Smaller canvas. Bigger lessons.
The work happens after “The End.”