As  Alan Lakein said, "Failing to plan is planning to fail." and that applies equally when working on a large writing project as much as any business venture. So how do you approach planning a new novel or even possibly a series?

When writing short stories, I do very little up-front planning. I think this is probably fairly typical and partly due to the nature of 'shorts' plus the genre I write most in (SF). In my experience, short stories tend to be more 'of the moment', often inspired by some piece of news or interesting thought/observation. They never go into any great depth, so, other than checking a few facts here and there, they don't need a great deal of pre-determinism.

It's like this though, you don't really need a lot of planning to put up a garden shed - but if you're planning an extension to the upper floor of your house you better have a pretty good idea what you are doing before you start. In the same way longer pieces take a little more thought.

Depending who you read about such things, advice seems to fall into one of two schools of thought.

The first school (the digital mega-thinkers of Quarn) say that you should plan things out in meticulous detail before you put pen to paper (or fingers to word processor). You need to research every point down to the finest detail, from the character's family history to the price of kippers at the supermarket she visits as a child.

I tried this with one of my pieces of work. I spent months in preparation, researching every little thing I could. I 'interviewed' my characters, worked out detailed histories and so on. It was the best planned piece of work I ever did.

I never finished the story.

After all those months of plotting, planning, strategising, breaking down into chapter, plot points, scenes, actually trying to write the piece was somewhat like trying to eat toast that's been served up for breakfast at the local diner for seven days, didn't get eaten and was reheated again and again. Not only that, the toast wasn't even nice to begin with.

All my inspiration and creativity, all my goals and dreams for the piece of work were used up in the planning stage rather than the writing. By the time I started actually 'writing' there was nothing left to discover, nothing to enjoy. It was just a mental drudge trying to translate all my detailed notes into something vaguely 'creative'.

Now the other school (the Laureates) says that writing is all about creation. Abandon any hopes of trying to 'organise' anything, you must sit there and write only as (and when) directed by the fabled muse. Planning? That's for people who write dusty text books and dry, uninteresting tomes full of graphs and charts, not us fiction writers.

Well I tried that too. I had a ball, I enjoyed every single moment of the writing process, every word of every page was a new and exciting discovery. "I didn't know that was going to happen." I just to cry, only to be greeted by a look of consternation from Hilary, usually accompanied by the words "How could you not know it was going to happen? You're writing it." often accompanied that perhaps I should perhaps take some pills or see a Doctor.

The only trouble was, I got lost. I never had a clear idea of what I wanted to achieve, my characters literally had a mind of their own (and, even more unfortunately for them, it was mine!). My plotting went everywhere and nowhere. What I ended up with didn't exactly stink - but it was listing heavily on the amateur-side.

So what to do? Was I condemned to a life of a zillion and one unfinished works or an equally large pile that were finished but crusty as a crustacean?

What I did was think a while. It seemed to me that there should be some comfortable middle ground. Enough planning to keep you focused, yet free enough to allow the creative 'elbow room' needed to keep it fun.

My solution is pretty simple really.

What I do is start with the characters. Characters are the literal life-blood of your work, without good, strong characters you're probably better off sticking to writing fiction like your yearly tax returns or something. Characters are everything, so make sure you have a good set of strong characters.

To paraphrase Orwell, some characters are more equal than others, so set those up with interesting backgrounds and lives. You don't need to go into too much detail, just have a few things that make this particular character interesting to write about - this ensures they're interesting to read about too (you _do_ want people to be interested in reading your work, don't you?). You don't need more than three or four things per character.

Also, set these characters up with a past. A couple of old friends, a sibling that was involved in a bizarre accident with a watermelon and a vacuum cleaner, that sort of thing. Again, you don't need to know everything, just enough to add solidity to the character.

Finally on characters, you need to determine roughly their entrance (and exit). This also brings in how the various characters might meet and the links between them.

Don't worry about the rest of the characters, these are of minor interest and you can just throw in a stereotype now and then as 'colour' as and when you need them, they don't need any real depth.

Now, you have to decide what you want to write about. The scenario as well as any 'message' or theme. This needs to be detailed reasonably well, it's what the whole piece hangs around.  In SF this is largely a case of playing mental 'what if' games in your head, in other cases this may be research into particular time periods or places. You don't need to know 100% of it, but you need to have it clearly define in your own head so that you could give someone a rough explanation at a sumptuous writers' dinner party, for example.

Or maybe not, but you get the idea.

Work out the main interactions between the key players, how they meet up (roughly) and any technical or historical type issues you want to include.

So now you have your characters, you have your setting and any information you need. The next thing I do is one of the oldest tricks in the book. Think of how you want to start.

Every story needs a good start to draw people in. This can be something dramatic or something relatively subtle, but whatever way it is you need to hook people. Starting with some form of conflict or disruption is always a good place to begin. Also, don't try to start with explanation or 'ease' people in, plunge straight in and let the reader catch up later.

Next, think of how you want this thing to end. One piece I did was constructed entirely on the last line he spoke. I knew exactly where I was going all along, although I didn't always know how I was going to get there. Which brings us to…

Work out a rough progression of steps in between the start and end. Not detailed reams of first A, then B... just a broad outline of what will take your participants from here to there.

That's it. Now you can let your characters loose in the scenario you have created and give them free reign, knowing that they will stick (roughly) to the guides you imagined. At the same time, you will keep your own rambling impulses in check too and have more chance of finishing with something you are happy with.

Naturally, this is just my approach. Don't be afraid to play with the ideas and do as little or as much as you like.

If you enjoy planning, then feel free to indulge that - just try not to burn out on it. If you find planning anything more than sitting down at the word processor a pain,  then  enjoy yourself . Though you might find the revisions later a little tedious. The point is this is your writing, so don't feel the need to slavishly follow anyone else's doctrine.

Until next time, write on!