Often – at festivals, in libraries, in theatres and book shops – I am asked the planning question (Do I plan my novels in advance?) either by a member of the audience or by an interviewer who is interviewing me and one or two other crime writers on a panel. Almost always the other crime writers say, ‘Oh, I never plan. I’d hate to plan – I’d feel as if I’d told the story already. The writing process is how I discover the story…’ Etcetera. (The notable exceptions to this rule that I can I can recall are Jeffery Deaver and Andrew Gross, both of whom are planning aficionados, and would no more fail to plan their novels in advance than fail to put clothes on before going to the shops.)
There’s no denying, though, that – at least in my experience – ninety per cent of novelists asked will say that they don’t plan, and they will often follow that up with a comment that implies planning would somehow take the fun/creativity out of the process for them.

The opposite is true for me. And, since so many people at the Swanwick summer school found this helpful to hear, I’ve decided to write about it. So…here goes:

WHY AND HOW I PLAN MY NOVELS:

The main reason I’m a planner is that it’s huge fun! It makes life SO much easier for a writer, and it gives you something concrete to look forward to. I would hate to start writing a novel with no clue as to what might happen from chapter to chapter, or how it might end. It would be like stripping the old wallpaper in your house and pulling up all the old carpets with literally no idea how you want the rooms to look at the end of the process, once you’ve finished all your hard work. How much more satisfying would it be to tear up all that old stuff with a clear vision in your mind as to how your beautiful, newly-refurbished house will look?

I find it’s the same with books. I like to look forward to the finished product, confident that I’ll still feel it’s as solid and exciting then as I do at the start. Not all ideas are good; not all inspirations can be made to work. Without a start-to-finish plan of what’s going to happen in my novel, I don’t know for certain that the idea is viable. It’s by writing a chapter-by-chapter, scene-by-scene synopsis that I put this to the test. I’d hate to invest years or even months in an idea I suspected was great, and then get to where the denouement should be and find myself thinking, ‘Yikes! I can’t think of a decent ending!’

Writers tend to be at least slightly neurotic. The process of planning first and then writing the proper book afterwards is IDEAL for anyone of a neurotic disposition. You don’t have to call it ‘planning’, either – I agree, the word is a bit pedestrian and makes you think of traffic calming measures being discussed in city council meetings. You can call it ‘Story Architecture’ instead – that sounds pretentious, but is actually a very accurate way of describing the process.

An architect wouldn’t start a building project, slapping the cement onto the bricks, without first doing at least one drawing, and probably more, of the proposed house. He’d probably want to look at that drawing and have the chance to think, ‘Hang on! There are eight bedrooms and only one loo! Better add another loo!’ And loos are so much easier to add to a drawing than to an already-standing mansion – at that point, you’d have to have a whole extension thing going on, or even pull down your house and start from scratch. Much more work, cost and hassle.

This is as true of clues as it is of loos. If you notice at the planning stage that you’ve got absolutely no clues that might lead readers to suspect either your culprit or anyone else, that’s a huge problem in a traditional crime novel. If you have a plan, you can write under the heading ‘Chapter 10’ the words ‘Think of major clue and insert it here, though subtly.’ Then, when you come to write the actual book, you’ve already got all your plot and structure and characters fully sorted and fleshed out – you can concentrate on writing as well and clearly and elegantly and beautifully as you can, bringing your already-sorted story to life, without simultaneously worrying, ‘Is this plot, in fact, working?’ (And, by the way, when you’re writing the plan, you don’t have to write elegantly and beautifully. You just need to get the information down clearly. My book plans read as if they were written by a robot: ‘First this happens, then this happens…’)

If you get the planning and plan-editing process right, you should only have to write one complete draft of your novel. Of course, there will be edits later on, but you might not have to do a complete second draft that feels almost like starting from scratch. A lot of the thriller-writers I know who turn up their noses at planning end up writing four or five drafts of their novel before they’re happy with it. You might want to do that – in which case, you should do it! – but if you’d like to spend one year writing a book rather than five, planning is the way forward.

Planning is also a great way of making sure that your novel does in fact have a plot – just like getting an X-ray would be a great way to check there’s a skeleton inside your body! A doctor could say, ‘Look, there are all the bones, in the right places. Be comforted to know that you’re not just a bundle of soft pink flesh!’ The same is true of looking at a plan for a novel – if there’s not enough plot, or a badly-calibrated plot, that will show up on your X-ray plan.

The biggest lie uttered by writers about planning is that it somehow limits or stifles creativity. This is absolutely untrue. Planners simply divide their writing process into two equally important and creative stages: story architecture, and actual writing. Both are fun. And yes, of course you can make as many changes as you want when you come to write the book – I’ve changed characters, endings, plot strands, everything *very* spontaneously, even with my plan at my side, when it’s felt like the right thing to do. I still wouldn’t be without my trusty plan, though.

I think there’s also a misconception in some people’s minds that if you care and talk about and prioritise planning – plotting – that somehow this must mean you don’t care about character depth and psychological insight. This is total nonsense! If you’ve got fascinating characters to write about, have enough respect for them to make sure you’ve constructed a great plot for them to appear in. Plot and character are not rivals – they’re co-conspirators.

That’s why I write the way I write. As for how to plan, it’s very simple. I treat each novel plan as if it were a novel. I open a new document, I call it (for example) ‘DID YOU SEE MELODY? Plan’, and then I write, in this order:

– One-or-two-line elevator pitch: that is, how I would describe the driving narrative force in the book to someone who knew nothing about it.

– Blurb: More detailed story description in maximum two paragraphs, containing strong plot hook

– Setting: Time and Place, e.g. Paradise Valley, Arizona, 2017 in the case of Did You See Melody?

– Characters: A list of all characters, major and minor. Names, ages, personalities, appearances, and anything else I think would be useful to know about them.

– Background Information: This is anything I want to bear in mind before the action of the story begins, e.g.: ‘Carol and Bob used to be married and live in London. Then they adopted a child who was allergic to gluten, so they moved to a gluten-free gated estate in New Zealand, and after three uneventful years of living there…

– Then I’d write the heading ‘Chapter-by-Chapter Plan’ and write a detailed description of what will happen in each chapter. This includes everything important, from murders to ‘Carol wondered if Bob was giving her a funny look – but was she imagining it?’ If a chapter is divided into two or three scenes (as mine often are) then I separate those scenes with a little row of asterisks.

And then I plan the whole book from start to finish, regularly going back and revising my plan as I go along, until I’m happy with it. It can take up to two months – but it’s so worth it. There’s no better, more confidence-inspiring way to start writing a book than with a great, solid plan on your desk.

Are you a writer? Do you have dreams and goals that are currently making you more miserable and stressed than happy and exciting? Then you need to join Dream Author,  Sophie’s signature coaching programme for writers or anyone who wants to write. 

For more than 10 years – at my book events, at festivals, at parties – I have been regularly meeting writers and people who want to write. Most of them have some version of a tale of woe that they’re keen to tell me: that they’re too old, now, to ‘break through’; that they’re doomed always to be unsuccessful; they have no time to write that book they’ve always dreamed of writing; that they feel guilty when they write because they ‘should’ be attending to family and housework. All of these frustrated writers have writing dreams, and those dreams are making them feel terrible and discouraged rather than better and inspired. And that is both a) not very jolly and b) completely unnecessary.

I started to think, and plot, and plan…and soon afterwards, I created my Dream Author Coaching programme for writers and anyone who has always dreamed of writing. The programme is all about learning how to train your most powerful tool – your brain – to work in a way that optimises your chances of massive writing fulfilment and success. All writers, at whatever stage of their careers, have the power to feel joyful, energised, inspired and optimistic as they pursue their writing goals, and – brilliantly – these positive feelings massively contribute to bringing the achievement of our goals ever closer and making the results we want far more likely to happen.

Read on for ten top tips from the Dream Author Coaching programme, and see how you can improve your results simply by changing the way you think:

1) Separate Facts From Story
Feelings of discouragement are never caused by events or life circumstances/situations, but rather by what we make these circumstances mean. A rejection letter from an agent is a fact, but ‘Oh, no, this means I will never succeed’ is an optional belief – one we need never subscribe to. If believe that pessimistic thought, we feel terrible, and that terrible feeling cannot possibly fuel the kind of actions and behaviours we need to practise in order to create success in our futures. So, instead, we can think, ‘I’m on track. This – including the failure part – is the precise and only route to long-term success.’ And we can continue to believe in that future success as strongly as we ever did.

2) Thought Auditions
The thoughts that pass through our minds are not ‘ours’ unless and until we choose to think them on purpose, believe them and identify with them. Only then do they become ‘my thoughts’. Judge each passing thought as if it has shown up for an audition (and you’re the Casting Director of a great Thought Show!). Let it have its say, and ask yourself: how will I feel if I believe this thought? What actions will that feeling produce, and how likely are those actions to create the result I want for myself in relation to my writing? If the thought you’re ‘auditioning’ is something like ‘I might as well give up because my book’s probably rubbish’, then you can choose to think, as your Thought Show’s Casting Director, ‘No, thanks, I don’t want to cast that partticular thought in the lead role.’ That thought has then failed its audition – you send it on its way. It’s not *your* thought, it’s just *a* thought that passed through your mind. Send it on its way…and then you’re free to choose whatever tthought you like to play that lead role. How about something like ‘I am going to pursue my writing dreams and believe in my success no matter what obstacles I encounter’?

3) Emotional Adulthood
Victims need villains in their stories, in order to maintain the victim identity. As writers, our villains of choice might be agents who rejected us, or editors who were rude about our manuscripts, or reviewers who trashed our work. Initially, a victim identity – our cherished story about how the literary world has wronged and underestimated us – can be comforting to its owner, but ultimately it is always disempowering. When we take full responsibility for our results, we deprive others of the power to have a detrimental impact on our progress. Other people’s behaviour towards us is a circumstance – a fact – that we can’t change. All our power lies in choosing how to think about that behaviour and about all the other facts in the world that we can’t control, and in choosing how to respond to it in a way that makes our results *our* creations, not anyone else’s. We can and should always dispense with villain-and-victim thinking, and choose to be the hero of our story, not the victim of it – no matter what other people choose to do. This is true emotional adulthood, and it’s an essential tool if we want to create happiness and success in our writing lives.

4) The Past Does Not Determine The Future
Our future begins today – no earlier – and is shaped by the thoughts we choose to think and believe today and from now on. Nothing about what happened in the past has any influence upon what happens next unless we keep thinking, feeling and behaving in the same old ways. When we want a different result to the one we’ve been getting for the last ten years, it’s time to choose different thoughts that will generate new feelings and new actions. Consider: if you’ve failed 500 times trying to open an envelope with your toes, that doesn’t mean you will never succeed in opening that envelope. It simply means you must think differently about the problem, and change your approach and strategy. Try to open the envelope with your fingers, for example, and your 501st attempt will almost definitely yield a different result!

5) Be, Do, Have, not Do, Have, Be:
We might have a very clear picture of the successful writer we want to be one day but we’re often confused about the process of how to get there. Imagining our future self – the person we will be when we’ve achieved our goals – is a vital step in working out the route, but most of us assume we need first to work very hard and then get/have great results in order to become that next version of us. In fact, that’s completely the wrong way round. Instead, we need to look at how our Future Self will *think and feel* about her/his/their success, and then we need to get our present-day thoughts and feelings from that Future Self we’ve created in our mind, and practise being that next-level us right now, starting from today. We need first to *be* the massively successful version of ourselves in our minds; only then can we create massively successful results in our actual present-day lives.
6) The ‘Literary Diagnostics’ Approach
Dream Author’s revolutionary approach to editing is a real game-changer. This tool, partly inspired by the brilliant Dr Greg House from American TV series House MD, has a powerful effect upon a writer’s ability to analyse and improve their work. It’s an approach that has saved the lives of many manuscripts!

7) The ‘Gnocchi’ Drafting Process
Named after the part-pasta-part-potato dish, this infallible approach to planning and drafting your book is unique to Dream Author, and has a transformative and energising effect on the entire creative process!

8) Set Yourself an Impossible Goal
Whenever we’re striving to achieve a goal that we see as being possible for us, we’re imposing an unhelpful and premature limitation on ourselves: if we know we can do it, then we might well do it, but we won’t stretch ourselves and grow our achievement-capacity in the attainment of the result. Instead, we should set ourselves a wishful-thinking goal that, at the time of setting, feels truly impossible to us.
And then? We work towards it as if it were possible by setting a series of smaller do-goals and working our way steadily towards the allegedly-impossible. When we do this, two brilliant things happen. First, we find that we achieve more than we ever would have if we’d aimed lower, and second: by seriously attempting and aiming for the impossible, we are very likely to become a person for whom our goal is not at impossible! We become the person who is capable of achieving that very thing.

9) Avoid Success Resistance and Success Expectation:
If you’re a writer who doesn’t celebrate the small successes, or who gets a great result and then immediately dampens your excitement with a ‘Yes, but this doesn’t count as proper success, because…’ thought, it’s highly likely that when you achieve even big success goals, you won’t benefit from all those wonderful ‘success feelings’ – because by then your brian will be so practised and adept at finding problems and thinking ‘Yes, but…’ Our brains are creatures of habit, so we need to start training them immediately to celebrate and feel great about *all* our achievements and successes, however small.
Then we’re able to want and aim for bigger success not from scarcity-thinking but from abundance- thinking, which is so much more effective and enjoyable! Success Expectation, too, can decrease our belief in our chances of creating success for ourselves, and when this belief drops off, we’re likely to give up – and once that’s happened, our chance of success is zero, right? Make sure you are not so rigid in your thinking that you give up on your goals and dreams if success doesn’t happen within a particular time-frame or arrive in a particular way.

10) Action with Unlimited Belief (AWUB)
Complete belief in future success enables us to take ‘massive action’. What does that mean? Simply this: we keep taking action towards our goal until that goal is achieved. When we believe that our eventual success is a given, any disappointments and failures along the way turn into learning opportunities and vital stepping-stones along the path to our dreams coming true, rather than evidence we should feel discouraged and/or give up. It is in this precise way that an unlimited belief in ourselves and our ability to realise our dreams is the most potent aid to success. There’s often a temptation to be doubtful of our abilities in order to protect ourselves from disappointment, but pessimism doesn’t protect us at all. Pessimism is just choosing to feel bad in anticipation of an unhappy ending that might or might not happen – but it’s 500% more likely to happen if we believe it will, because then we take no action at all to create the opposite result.

If you’d like to join Dream Author and learn how to create more fulfilment and success that you’ve ever thought possible, you can find out more, and sample some Dream Author coaching podcasts and webinars, here:

https://dreamauthorcoaching.com

A significant moment…

Mindful Grudge Creation

We all hold grudges

The Dictionaries are wrong!

The Oxford English Dictionary says, “A grudge is a long-lasting feeling of resentment or dislike.” That definition is wrong. So are all the other dictionary definitions I’ve read. Here’s one from the Collins English Dictionary: “A grudge is a persistent feeling of resentment, especially one due to some cause, such as an insult or injury.” Urban Dictionary defines a grudge as “a bad feeling or hate that you hold against another person for something bad they did, or you think they did to you.”

Wrong, wrong, wrong. A grudge is not a feeling. A grudge is a story. It can also be a symbolic justice object, a protective device, a source of inspiration, a prompt for laughter, a lucky charm of sorts, a stepping stone that points you in the right life direction — but it is never a feeling, and it’s vital that we recognize this. If we imagine that a grudge is a destructive or negative feeling, then we will continue to believe, incorrectly, that holding onto grudges is bad for us when in fact the opposite is true: Our grudges can do great good in our lives and in the world, if we hold them responsibly.

A concrete example

I don’t normally argue with dictionaries, but in this instance I can prove they’re wrong about the word “grudge.” Let me use a concrete example of one of my own grudge stories.

For many years now, my friend Steph (not her real name) has shown no interest in any of the aspects of my life that matter to me: my work or my future plans, for example. For all she knows, I could’ve been planning to give up writing on 1 January 2019 and become a plumber. She would have no idea if this were the case because she never asks me any question that would enable me to talk about what’s going on in my life/mind. I used to try to talk to her about such things, but she didn’t listen, and I eventually stopped trying.

I still like Steph a lot, as she is a fundamentally good person and has many great qualities; we have fun together, and I find her fascinating to talk to about the things that she is interested in talking about. My grudge is very specific, and can be summarized as follows: “My friend Steph has no interest in my life, and I don’t think that’s okay, and I further believe that the not-okay-ness of it is important.”

Holding onto my grudge story about Steph is my way of saying to myself, “Poor treatment of me matters, and I’m not going to pretend it doesn’t.” This is precisely how a grudge can act as a commemorative justice object. Thanks to my grudge about Steph, I do not feel that my continuing friendship with her constitutes her having got away with her sub-optimal behavior. I know that she hasn’t got away with it scot-free, or received no sanction, or had it escape the world’s notice; the presence of my grudge in my mind and life shows me that Steph’s poor treatment of me in this one respect has been appropriately registered and awarded Official Recognition of Significance.

When I first identified Steph’s complete lack of interest in my life, I had bad feelings about it: I felt hurt and resentful. For about six months, whenever she and I met up, I would come away feeling that my entire being had been dismissed and invalidated. I would mutter darkly, “That’s it! I’m never seeing her again!” Then I worked out that, by letting her affect me emotionally, I was colluding in the tormenting of myself. Instantly, I made the decision to remove Steph’s power to make me feel negated by simply deciding that I would feel fine no matter how she behaved. Since all my other friends asked me interested questions regularly, as I did of them, I realized that I did not need Steph to ask me a single question ever again in order to feel absolutely fine. Now, when I see her, I enjoy her company without any negative feelings, having fully accepted that she is who she is and is not likely to change.

Do I still want Steph in my life? Of course. I don’t believe in banishing people for bad behavior if they’re generally good people, and I have no doubt that she is. But do I have a grudge about Steph’s lack of interest in me? Yes, absolutely—and it’s one I want to keep, because it protects and inspires me. How am I protected? Well, if I have a personal life or career issue that really matters to me and requires detailed discussion, I will talk to my other friends about it and not mention it to Steph, and so I won’t be hurt or disappointed by her lack of interest because I simply won’t encounter it. I’ve also adjusted (downwardly) the amount of interest I allow myself to take in Steph’s life because I know that I wouldn’t find it satisfying to endorse (with my willing participation) a friendship that was heavily unequal in this respect. That doesn’t mean I can’t have a great night out with her and appreciate all her amazing qualities.

Inspired by a Grudge

How am I inspired by my Steph grudge? Since identifying the way she behaves in relation to showing interest in others, I’ve realized what one of my highest-priority aims and values is: Always show great interest in other people—friends and family, of course, but also new people, and even strangers. I am inspired and motivated, partly thanks to Steph, to nurture the side of me that always wants to ask loads of questions and hear about the lives and concerns of others in great detail.

For several years now, there have been no negative feelings associated with my Steph grudge. The negative feelings caused by the initial GSIs (grudge-sparking incidents: all those occasions when she shut me down or shut me up or asked no questions) have long since moved on, and all I’m left with is my instructive, justice-providing, and motivational grudge.

This is true of all my grudges (apart from the most recently acquired ones, which still have negative feelings attached to them because the GSI only happened last week and my annoyance hasn’t yet dissolved — but that annoyance is just a feeling, it’s not my grudge). I’ve retained the useful stories and my analysis of them — the lessons learned and the list of benefits the grudge has brought into my life, and all of this continues to help, inspire and protect me. That’s the part that improves my life. With any of my grudges that are more than a month old (which is most of thme), my pain or anger has moved on a long time ago. That’s how I can prove, beyond doubt, that a grudge is not a feeling. All the dictionary definitions are confusing the initial negative feelings that spring up as a result of the GSI with the grudge itself. Once you realize that a grudge is a story — or a symbolic justice object that takes the form of a story and the lessons you’ve learned from it — then you immediately see that keeping a grudge doesn’t have to mean hanging on to any pain or anger.
How do I feel about Steph? I love her. Do I forgive her lack of interest/questions? Absolutely. I’m certain she’s doing her best, loves me, and wants only good things for me. That doesn’t mean I’m going to introduce a Total Clean Slate policy and pretend that the one bad thing she does in relation to me is okay. In fact, it’s only my grudge about Steph that enables me to feel so positive about her, because I know that my forgiveness of her on an emotional level doesn’t mean that I’m being unjust towards myself and accepting unacceptable treatment. My grudge tells me that I will never, and should never, think that it’s okay for anyone to show no interest in a close friend. And here’s the crucial thing: When I ask myself “How does my grudge about Steph make me feel when I call it to mind?”, my answer contains only positive feelings: empowered, wise, protected, grateful.

(This article first appeared in Red magazine)

The festive season is nearly upon us — which means that many new grudges will be formed in homes all over the country. Most of us believe we shouldn’t hold grudges, especially at Christmas, but often it’s hard not to. I’ll never forget the Christmas Day I spent with someone who sulked all morning, creating a dark, tense mood that filled the whole house, because someone spilled a glass of water on her rug. That’s right: water. The clear sort that leaves no stain. That was what inspired her to ruin the Christmas morning of five innocent people.

Some people tell me, proudly, that they never hold grudges. As a self-help addict, I understand the importance of forgiving. My bookshelves are full of titles like ‘Love Everyone You Meet, However Awful’. This advice is not practical for ordinary, flawed people like me. I know all the theory by heart (I once took an online test called ‘Are you Enlightened?’ and got the second-highest ranking: ‘Not quite guru-level, but almost’) but for a long time, I found it impossible to practise non-judgemental, enlightened living.

Unfairness was my trigger. Whenever I encountered it, my inner justice-seeker would trample all over my outer meditative pacifist in a manner that was, frankly, brutal. I still have a grudge about the teacher who told me the poem I’d written was ‘too good for a child’ and accused me of plagiarism. I’m still grudging hard for the boss who berated me for not doing something that she had given me express permisison not to do.

After years of grudge-guilt, I finally saw the light: grudges aren’t shameful. They’re wonderful. Now, whenever someone boasts about not holding them, I think, ‘How silly! Grudges are great!’ For example, it’sgreat that I have a grudge about Felix (name changed), who occasionally tries to force me to have dinner with him, then bombards me with bursts of rage and emotional blackmail when I decline his invitations. I need my grudge about Felix to protect me from him.

Grudges are not an obstacle to forgiveness or inner peace; rather, they are the very route to both. Here’s the thing: the angry feelings we associate with grudge-holding actually come from resisting our innate awareness that other people’s poor treatment of us matters. If we give ourselves permission to think, ‘Yes, George treated me unfairly, that’s not okay by me, and I’m going to remember it and behave differently around him in future, to protect myself’, then immediately, rage and bitterness start to dissolve. Why? Because we’ve validated ourselves. We’ve asserted, symbolically, that the transgression against us counts in the world. We deserve to be treated well.

Dictionary definitions of ‘grudge’ unhelpfully conflate grudges with negative feelings, but a grudge isn’t a feeling. It’s a story from our past that we choose to remember because it’s instructive: ‘Doug hits me. I will avoid Doug.’ Our grudges reinforce our value systems: ‘Maureen screams at me whenever I challenge her. I never want to behave like her.’ Grudges can be inspiring: how many people have been determined to succeed after being told they never would? Most importantly, once your grudge is in place, you can afford to forgive Felix, George, Doug and Maureen, and (trust me) you will feel more inclined to do so.

So next time someone tells you, ‘Move on’, say ‘I will – with my grudge to guide me.’ Once you’ve learned how to use grudges correctly, you’ll see how great they can be. Holding a grudge doesn’t make you bitter, and the people who try to pretend it does? Hold a grudge about them! This Christmas, give yourself the gift of permission to hold great grudges for a better life.