Remember to Plan

 Here's more writing advice I probably shared before but recently I was reminded why I said it in the first place.  With my Eric Filler stories I usually don't do a lot of planning.  I have a vague idea and then I launch into it and sorta figure everything out as I go.  The Swapping Mall Holiday Special was a good example of that where I just started in and after about 5000 words figured out where I wanted to go.

But recently I had this idea to do a heist story--with a twist.  The idea is there's a thief who gets caught by a character from a previous story.  She uses a magic watch to turn him into a teenage girl to infiltrate an all-girls school to steal a valuable painting.  But to do the job, the thief needs to recruit a crew.

Easy, right?  Not at all!  Because you can't really just launch into a heist story like that.  A story like that there needs to be a plan so you can figure out all the steps of the heist and all the characters you need.  In particular since this was an art heist, I got bogged down in trying to figure out how to get the painting out.  It got to the point where I was making it so complicated that I stopped for a week or two to work on a Valentine's Day story.  (Which I did more or less just half ass and pick my way through.)

The thief character is actually based on Donald Westlake's Dortmunder character and his name (Porter Rumsey) is actually the alias of Westlake's Parker character (called Porter in the Mel Gibson movie Payback) and Rumsey was the last name of an alternate universe Dortmunder in a short story Westlake wrote.  So while I was working on that other story, one day I went through one of the Dortmunder books that involved an art heist and took some mental notes.  That helped to clear some things up so I could get back to work.

The point though is I should have done the work ahead of time.  I should have done my research and figured out who Porter would need and what they'd need to do.  With something intricate like a heist you really need to plan things out ahead of time--like Dortmunder or Parker would do in pulling off a heist.  And with most stories that is a good idea.

It's like the old saying goes:  fail to plan, plan to fail.