How to Balance Spontaneous Creativity and Planning as a Writer

Your brain is prone to find solutions when you let it wander and don’t think too hard. So you have to be ready to write anytime, anywhere. You can’t force the story, article, or other content to come. But if you work based only on when your brain wanders, then you’ll never meet a deadline. If you promise an editor you’ll have a draft by the end of the week or in a few months, at some point, you can’t wait anymore. So how do you balance spontaneous creativity and planning as a writer?

1. Surround yourself with or get involved in areas related to what you want to write about.

If you’re writing a mystery, play some sleuthing games, go on a scavenger hunt, watch crime documentaries, or read content connected to the mystery (e.g., how a specific forensic technique works). The idea isn’t to find a specific solution. It’s just to get more information; get some deeper, emotional, and experiential knowledge of the topic; and to become really comfortable with the elements of the mystery world. You might find what you need to move forward without consciously realizing it. The facts might not fit what you’re currently aiming for. But they might work for something later, so literally file them away.

2. Set boundaries.

Drafts can get better the more you learn or tweak. But it’s generally not a matter of whether you can add or adjust. It’s a matter of whether you should. Ask yourself what the piece you’re writing really requires. If your draft is clear and convincing with just six reliable sources, don’t waste your time looking for a dozen. If two transitions work equally well, then just pick one and move on. Have a vision or goal for your message, but don’t let what could be get you stuck or distract you from what you actually need.

3. Consider outlining and chronology.

Outlines and structure do help when trying to balance spontaneous creativity and planning as a writer. But nothing says you need to work through your outline in order. If you get a great concept for Chapter 13 while you’re writing Chapter 2, go ahead and flesh that concept out as much as you can. Any writing moves the draft closer to completion. Yes, you might have to smooth out transitions later, and you might decide that your concept doesn’t work after all. But the practice of just going after the idea and rounding it out will help you everywhere else.

4. Work in bits and pieces.

Connected to the third point above, if a single sentence comes to you, then record it. With simple pocket notebooks and tools like voice-to-text and Google Docs available through smartphones 24/7, you really don’t have any excuse not to. Let go of the idea that you have to write a lot to be doing something significant. Often, it’s that epiphany sentence that flashes in front of you as you stumble for your coffee that ends up being the cornerstone for entire pages or chapters, or that encapsulates the heart of your entire manuscript.

5. Set some time aside for writing every day.

But don’t necessarily force yourself to work on anything specific during your writing session. Instead, try to have multiple irons in the fire to choose from. Then ping around based on what feels the most complete in your head or what best suits your mood. If you have an idea for something else while you’re working on one manuscript, stop long enough to jot that something else down. Getting the idea notated will improve your result because you’ll always feel like you have more of a choice. Feeling forced or confined never put any writer in a good mood, and bad moods generally aren’t conducive to getting into a great state of flow.

6. Don’t judge what’s on the page.

Just get the concepts out and trust yourself to pull out the best pieces when you’re done. Try a couple of different approaches or phrasings and see which one you keep coming back to later. That’s probably your winner. If you’re having trouble choosing between two options, try to identify what keeps speaking to you from both. Then do a reasonable merge. Plenty of times, I’ve written the main idea more than one way and realized the best solution was to splice two versions together.

7. Submit your work for feedback.

Often others can see what we can’t. And sometimes, all we need to continue well is for someone else to get us thinking in a different way or to point out something we perhaps hadn’t considered. By finding and using good feedback forums, you’ll get in the habit of feeling obligated to create something without necessarily feeling like that something has to stay as it is. Simply defending what we already have on the page shows us how committed we are to a certain description, plot line, or thesis. The more confident you feel in your defense, the more likely you are to keep on refining/promoting your work and querying even through the trolling of the worst naysayers.