Plan B IS Plan A

Unexpected detours can reshape your writing career - and your life

A few weeks ago, I chatted with a colleague online. We discussed our professional roles prior to working for our current company; as I relayed my early career history to her, she said it sounded “well-rounded.” 

That felt like a genuine compliment. Interestingly, it clashes roundly with my own internal thoughts of my early career days. I have always felt like that period of my life was a hot mess. 

Between ages 22 and 30, I had a series of fascinating non-writing jobs, such as:

• Serving as a veterinary assistant at a cat clinic (a/k/a chief litter-changer and kitty-bather);

• Impersonating Clifford the Big Red Dog at a library opening;

• Strapping myself into a 70-foot-high cherry picker to get an “establishing” shot for an industrial training video;

• Working as a traveling library book sale coordinator.

As career anecdotes go, these moments were humorous, quirky, and entertaining. I had a hard time before age 30 convincing potential employers they were representative of my writing skills, though. 

We writers are not alone in the striving to “make sense of the chaos of life” department. Bruce Feiler, author of Life Is In The Transitions, compiled data from hundreds of individuals across the United States about their life stories. He concluded from this study that disruptive transitions are becoming more plentiful and more nonlinear. In other words, we all now have MORE opportunities to deal with significant change, and that change is going to seem more and more random. Entropy increases.

So why should a writer care about how they present their career/life narrative to the world? Heck, with 2020 having turned out to be a complete crazy train, why even bother with a Plan A, much less Plan B?

My answer is that no one can predict with any accuracy where their career will take them. What we can do, especially when we’re talking to an editor or an agent or someone else about our writing career, is to shape our story so that the challenges we’ve experienced don’t come off sounding like contaminating events that ruined our “perfect” life plan, but rather motivators to create “redemption stories” that allow us to take our circumstances from bad to better. 

According to Emory University researcher Dr. Marshall Duke, the story type that most encourages resilience is what’s known as the oscillating narrative. His studies show children who hear their family history presented as a series of good AND bad events, through which the family has prevailed by sticking together and supporting each other, have better self-confidence and are better able to modulate the impacts of stressors on their lives. 

So, the takeaway in my mind is that while we cannot completely control what happens to our writing careers, we can use our skills as writers to talk about what those happenings mean to us.

Natasha Stanley, head coach for the website Careershifters, recommends several strategies for talking about career change that work really well for discussing “Plan B” writing-related events with others. They include: 

1. Know your audience. Who am I telling this story to? How do their life experiences overlap with mine?

2. Discuss your past. What was your old writing storyline? Mine, back in the golden days of the 1980s, was that I was going to go directly from college to being a famous magazine writer. 

3. Shape your revised storyline around pivotal “moments of transition.” What happened to blow up your Plan A story? In my case, this amounted to a complete lack of knowledge about marketing myself, and the status of the magazine industry in the early 1990s. How did you respond? I responded by grabbing any job I could get, learning about how the job market functioned, and trying experiences that made me a better writer, or at least one who has interesting personal stories. The secret is to get your audience asking breathlessly, “And THEN what happened!?”

4. End your story by highlighting the ways that your Plan B story is consistent with your Plan A story. By holding fast to the concepts above, including the oscillating narrative and redemption story frames, you can show others how the “post-disruption” you is the same person as “pre-disruption” you, but also “new and improved!” In my case, my Plan B career events, which continue to the present day, provide me with a much broader writing skill set than if I had only written magazine articles for the past 30+ years. 

When you talk to yourself, or a colleague, or that editor to whom you are dying to pitch story ideas, having a Plan A related to your writing career still matters. Plan A goals help you focus and give you a direction to start moving in. They allow you to build your career narrative. Just don’t feel as if you’ve failed if you have to keep pivoting to Plan B because you hit delays, rejections or out-of-the-blue (or just plain weird) opportunities that take your writing in a direction you didn’t expect. 

As time passes, all of those Plan B activities become your Plan A narrative. When you become aware of this, and proactively make use of it, you are able to showcase yourself as a more resilient, flexible, and capable writer. 

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That’s it for this issue! Let me know your experiences with “Plan B” moments and how they’ve shaped your writing career by replying to this email. Until next time, wishing you all long days and pleasant nights.