I have always been fond of a good plan. I like to plan mundane things in my daily agenda, big events in my google calendar, and life goals in my head while lying in bed (which, admittedly, isn’t great for my sleep schedule). And this tendency directly affects my writing process. Perhaps paradoxically, I have never been a huge fan of mapping out my writing on paper. However, I always have a plan for my pieces in my mind. I know what things I want to say, how I want to say them, and what I want the piece to feel like. Once I develop this plan, it’s game over. Of course, like all writers, I engage in the tedium of editing and revising, but the bones of the piece rarely change. I have been so attached to certain sentences that, despite not being the best fit, I just can’t bear to part with them. Once I have a plan, I stick to the plan because plans are trusty and safe and I like them (I’m sure psychologists could have a field day with that).

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I had to confront this particular hang up I have with plans last year in my Creative Writing class. The class consisted of a short story unit and a poetry unit, and culminated in a portfolio for each. I didn’t have much experience writing creatively, but enjoyed doing a bit of non-academic writing in my free time. This class is where I found my love for writing short stories, and my gradual acceptance for writing poems. It is also where I learned to kill my darlings. With any type of creative writing it is absolutely inevitable that at some point during editing, you will have to part with a plot line, character or sentence that you hold dear. I had experienced this on a smaller scale with academic papers. Perhaps there would be a topic I didn’t have room to cover, a paragraph I had to rework or some such thing. But in creative writing, everything you produce is entirely you. It is easy to get attached to your work, and it feels a lot more personal when you have to do away with something you had high hopes for. One such example is a poem I wrote initially called “A Bleak Affair.” After peer revisions, and some time playing around with edits, I took a leap and scrapped almost the entire poem except for the main concept. I had to do away with entire stanzas that I had enjoyed writing, but I ended up liking the second poem so much more because it captured the true nature of what I was trying to write about. Diverging from the plan had actually been a success, and my writing was better for it.

"And the honored man.


He was off 
in the sitting room alone.

Smoking a thick cigar,

that his daughter thought

would kill him.
"

--Poem 1

"Cheap cake and chintzy decorations in a musty living room."

--Poem 2

 

Fast forward to the beginning of the Minor in Writing Gateway class.  The premise of taking one piece and radically changing it three times seemed a little daunting, but, hey, I had already learned to kill my darlings and face my fears. Taking a Facebook post about a Planned Parenthood rally and turning it into something different would probably be a breeze! There were so many directions I could go! Wrong-o. The catch was that, while I had begun to learn how to be ruthless with what stayed and what got cut in my pieces, I was still uncomfortable with “radical changes” to the entire structure of a work.

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Early on in the class, I played it safe. My first experiment was a research paper, which started with the broad topic of women's healthcare, per my original text. Through peer review and editing, the topic was (very marginally) narrowed down to the ways in which healthcare has been gendered throughout history resulting in inadequate healthcare for women. Yes, I know, that's a mouthful. Going into this project, I thought this would be the experiment I carried out. The thing was, I have written many research papers, and I will write many more. It felt a little too safe. In the planning stages, I realized I didn’t have a firm grasp on what this paper was actually going to be about, and just wasn’t able to scope down to a topic that would make a solid research paper. I think this was because I was bored with it before I even started it. This brought me to my second experiment—the podcast. What began as a podcast version of my research paper morphed into a podcast mini-series entitled "The F-Word" (as in, you know, feminism). The first episode, which would be my fully realized final project, was going cover an intro to feminism itself, and why in the world people get so uncomfortable around that word. I loved it and went full force with the podcast idea. This was something I had never done before, and had officially piqued my interest.

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When I decided I wanted to do a podcast on feminism, I wasn’t as concerned with my other pieces, and focused on my plan for how to make an amazing podcast. Unfortunately, I realized towards to end of the experimentation period that I simply did not have enough time to make a podcast that was up to the standards I wanted it to be. I had planned, drafted, and workshopped this idea all to come to the conclusion that it wasn’t going to work. This left me not only without a plan for my final piece, but scrambling to decide which of my other experiments I was going to use now. I had no other choice but to switch gears and fully invest myself in a different project. That project, mostly through the process of elimination, ended up being my third experiment. I had initially conceived the idea of a blog post about some women’s healthcare topic that was pretty much still TBD. What can I say, I very was focused on my soon-to-be world-renowned podcast series. Once it hit me that the blog would be my final project, I took some time to edit my ideas, brought it into peer workshop and scoped down. Then I just started writing. From all of that, I ended up with a blog post about online harassment towards women and in what ways that phenomenon signifies how society listens to women. And, despite it being nothing like my original Facebook post or what I expected my final project to be, I can say with confidence that it is a piece I am proud of.

 

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Experimentations in my own writing have been trying. Killing my darlings in my own writing has been difficult. Big changes are difficult. I think this is because as a writer, you are the master of all things in the world that you create, be it a research paper or a fiction story. It is a lot harder to stray from a plan when you had expected everything to go your way. But, if you can learn to handle changes to a world that is all yours, then any wrench that the real world—as unpredictable and uncertain as it can be—throws in your plans, you can certainly handle. There have been many instances in my life where a well-laid plan has gone awry. The process of writing—an unexpected hero—has given me the tools to not just deal with those changes, but to craft something better out of them.

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