BEST LAID PLANS AND ALL THAT

Poet Burns sympathized with a mouse whose nest he had turned up with a plow, but reminded her that the best laid plans, not only of mice, but of men (women included in the terminology of the time) gang oft agley, which I take to mean fail to work out.

This has a lot to do with the writing trade, but applies all over the place. To present a political example or two, for starters, the man who is currently the governor of the state where I live, a Democrat, wishing to obtain a certain degree of cooperation between political parties, persuaded a Republican to share the ticket with him. A great plan, and it looked like it might work, since the two were elected. However, the other Republicans were mad as hell about all this, and drummed their former colleague out of all their decision-making processes. That party won in the legislature, also, and spared no effort in showing that there was by no means to be a degree of cooperation. From their point of view the Democrats were simply wrong, wrong, wrong, about everything, and by golly that was it.

This last election, the pair won again, but the legislature was about tied up, so the Republicans, still despising their former partner, demanded a spirit of bipartisanship. Which, of course, meant getting their own way.

On a national scale, our new president, unaware of how bipartisanship “works” out here in the west, imagined, and may still imagine, that he can obtain it in Washington, D. C. You have all seen enough news on TV to get an idea how much the spirit of cooperation has infused the other party. Yeah, yeah, to show how a double positive can constitute a negative.

Clearly a wonderful idea isn't, alone, enough to constitute a plan , much less one that won't gang agley .

On the other hand, when it comes to writing, the situation is not as simple as that of politics or any such stuff. When I wrote my first novel, I had a fine idea, which didn't ever seem to turn into a plan, but the story sort of put itself together anyway. By the time it was published, it was no longer in first person, the villain had changed into one of the good guys (one of his deputies now played that other role) and my detective had acquired a girlfriend who did the real solving of the crime. I don't know whether the various editors and agents who glanced at earlier versions (or more often only at query letters) suspected that there'd been some agley ganging, or not, but few would look and those who did didn't like it. Of course, it improved between submissions, so that the editor who finally accepted it had a better novel to accept, so tracing all the ups and downs isn't easy.

Skipping over novels two and three, number four has a great idea, and a detailed plan--enough that ganging agley was almost inevitable. Which has proved to be the case. The plan that evolved has deaths aplenty, visits to exotic lands (one problem being that I haven't visited any of them, not even Castro Valley, California), and yet the action moves slowly and much too cerebrally for contemporary Americans, a people who, for reasons that escape me, like gore, destruction, and above all “feelings.” Ah, well. (Oh, and the production of the first three was facilitated by acquiring a co-writer, my spouse, who being eight years younger, may possibly be better attuned to contemporary culture: she knows who the rock stars are, for example, while I have trouble even caring. Unfortunately she doesn't like the roughly half of number four that I thought I was doing pretty well on. Another plan gang agley .)

My own problems aren't the only ones however. There's a big semi-planned world out there. It's all I can do to, and in fact I can't, sympathize with that school of hero-worship whose adherents believe that billions of dollars obtained in a very short time merely by making alterations in who owns what with no apparent effort to see where value really comes from is evidence of genius. Without going more fully into my own view of the matter, let's just say that I think some axioms of the public are ill-laid plans that almost deserve to gang agley. To say nothing of those who actually indulge in manufacturing a product, but then package their wares in materials that are nearly impossible to remove, as if the object of a purchase were to turn up thirty years later on Antiques Roadshow with what will by then surely have become an antique still in its original (because still un-removable) packaging.

Or consider stuff (not a reference to my fourth novel) that simply doesn't work. The electronic era has turned selling merchandise that almost-works-but-not-quite into simplicity itself. Or maybe it's just that the manufacturer's plans have gang agley ? How many times have you got hold of something, some hard- or soft-ware, that works with, say, Windows, only to discover that it doesn't work with the version of Windows actually on your computer. It works on Windows 98 or ME, but not on Windows XP or Vista? Or vice versa. Sometimes the plan is curable by simply adjusting something (if you can find out what), just as one supposes Burns's wee beastie can “simply” rebuild her nest, but for man as for Mousie, it's a blasted inconvenience. My own latest is a device, a gift from my daughter, which should enable me to make digital copies of all the old 35 mm. camera slides we've accumulated. The thing crashes my computer. The company has a support line, where people (eventually) say, “try it on another computer.” I did, and it didn't crash that computer. In fact, it put a picture from a slide onto the computer screen. Unfortunately, there was then no way to continue by saving the image onto a disk. The support line people are no longer to be heard from. They had a plan, and they think their plans don't go agley ! The phenomenon is called “denial.” Maybe that's what we all should do: say everything's fine whether it is or not. Some call that optimism. We curmudgeons don't think it works for mice nor for men, but then, what do we know? (We'd planned by this stage of life, to know a lot , but you know what happens to plans.)