I Love It When a Plan Doesn't Come Together
This is going to be a short newsletter. I’m afraid things are going to be a bit spotty for the next couple weeks: I'm an instructor at the Lambda Literary Workshop, which is a huge honor, and then I'm off to Worldcon in Glasgow. I promise the newsletter will return to its regular verbosity and frequency in mid-August.
Recently I watched the Prime Video show My Lady Jane, which I enjoyed a lot despite occasionally finding the tweeness of the voiceover narration a bit overwhelming. Without giving anything away, it's a fun addition to the quirky alternate history subgenre, which also includes The Great and Dickinson off the top of my head. There was one thing, though, that I utterly adored about My lady Jane: the frequency with which the plummy-voiced narrator announces that “Jane has a plan.”
Not just because it's exciting when a main character is cunning, optimistic, and resourceful — though Jane is all of these things. But also because Jane's plans invariably fail. Sorry, that's a bit of a spoiler — but not really. You don't expect the good guys to have an easy time of it in a TV show.
This is one of my favorite things in pop culture generally — not just plans that fail, but heroes who keep making plans over and over that never quite work out. But the heroes don't give up, and they come up with yet another plan!
This, for my money, is one of the great strengths of Robert Holmes's writing on Doctor Who. Recent, ahem, events have led to a lot of people rewatching the classic 1976 story "The Pyramids of Mars," myself included. Like other stories from this era, such as “The Ark in Space," "Pyramids” features the Doctor making a series of clever plans… that all fail. He tries to get Ibrahim Amin’s ring and use it to block Sutekh’s control over his robots, he tries to blow up Sutekh’s rocket... The plans are actually good and have a decent chance of working, but the Doctor isn't up against an incompetent villain this time — at least, not until the end of the story, when Sutekh makes a foolish choice as to how to exit his pyramid prison.
This trope, of course, is a staple of heist narratives — it's not really a heist if everything goes perfectly, and a lot of the fun of a heist is watching things go wrong and the characters being forced to improvise.
But when it comes to a narrative about heroes and villains, that's when I especially like seeing plans fail and heroes having to think on their feet. There are a few reasons for this, the most basic being that most narratives feature a certain amount of filler or time-wasting on the way to the inevitable conclusion — classic Doctor Who is especially prone to some egregious padding. Do you fill all that time with endless fight scenes, in which it's not clear what happens if the fight is won or lost? Or chase scenes? Or the heroes getting captured and escaping, only to be recaptured soon after? Of all the ways of killing time until the final confrontation between good and not-so-good, the failed strategy is my favorite, because it involves the heroes spending the least time being a bit crap.
I very consciously play around with this in my young adult novels. Victories Greater than Death contains a sequence wherein Tina comes up with a clever battle plan that very nearly succeeds… but not quite. The third book of the trilogy, Promises Stronger Than Darkness, goes even further, setting up an extremely cunning plan of attack that really should have worked — except that Marrant is five steps ahead of everybody else.
Which brings me to the second reason why I love a heroic plan that fails: it makes your villains better. One of my incessant complaints about a lot of pop culture these days is the lack of interesting villains. Most villains are either 1) funhouse reflections of the hero, 2) sympathetic tragic figures who are doing a terrible thing for sympathetic reasons, or 3) just blathering doofuses. Or some combination of those three. It's rare to find a villain who exhibits real ruthlessness and viciousness, of the sort that we see literally every day in the real world. The cleverer and more airtight the plan a hero comes up with, the more formidable a villain will need to be to stop it. When all the heroes do is flail around until the hour arrives for them to win, villains don't really get to be awesome, either.
This is one thing I really loved about He Who Drowned the World by Shelly Parker-Chan, by the way. Zhu comes up with some freaking good plans in that book, but she's up against some truly competent antagonists, who use her own cleverness against her. It's one reason why that book was even more addictive than the first.
Not surprisingly, the final reason I love heroes who make clever but doomed plans is because of resilience. You shoot your shot and you miss, and you just have to keep going in spite of your many setbacks. Just because the last three plans failed, doesn't mean the next one will. Sometimes a plan backfires spectacularly, and you're worse off than you were before — but you still have to pick yourself up and find another way. I get way more inspiration in surviving our inexorable shitpocalypse from heroes who always have another plan up their sleeve, than from heroes who are on the back foot until the very end.
What do you do when you're out of plans? This is, without spoilers, the situation Jane faces at the end of the first season of My Lady Jane. It's also where the Doctor finds themself in the final minutes of “Pyramids of Mars,” and many other stories from that era. That's the moment when the hero has to make a leap of faith, come up with some last minute brilliant gambit, or finally solve some riddle or understand something that has made no sense up until now — allowing them to see another way forward.
When it's done well, this is a way of telling a story about creativity and the ability to make sense of a rapidly changing world — which is something we all need more of right now.
My Stuff
The Trans Nerd Meet Up is this Saturday at Biergarten in SF, starting around 1 PM.
My latest book review column in the Washington Post covers books by Aliette de Bodard, J.R. Creaden, Tobi Ogundiran and Miye Lee.
The latest episode of Our Opinions Are Correct features a conversation about absurdism in science fiction, plus an interview with Victor Manibo, author of Escape Velocity.
I’ve got some books you can buy. There’s my young adult Unstoppable trilogy, which has now been nominated for three Lodestar Awards and has now won two Locus Awards. Plus New Mutants Vol. 4 and New Mutants: Lethal Legion. Not to mention my writing advice book Never Say You Can't Survive and my short story collection Even Greater Mistakes!