Welcome to the Grammar Minute, where we’re saving the English language sixty seconds at a time! I’m Lauren Smyth, and I recently wrote a science fiction book about living inside a video game. It’s called Warsafe, and it comes out this summer. Someone recently asked me how much of the book I planned in advance. My answer was: Pretty much none. It wrote itself.
When planning a long piece of writing, like a book, it’s important to keep the overall point at the forefront of the story. That “point” is usually the culmination of the plot or the central claim of a nonfiction piece. You should be able to express this in a single sentence. In Warsafe’s case, this became the tagline: Play, win, survive. That’s the whole plot.
If you plan too much, you won’t be able to make changes on the fly when you’re fully immersed in the logic of your story and can see the trees inside the plot forest. Some of the best ideas or tidbits of new information can crop up spontaneously, and if you’re not willing to adjust your outline, you won’t be able to adapt.
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