The plan for writing includes moving the ideas from the back of the noggin to the keyboard. Milt Gross photo.

"Hopefully a nice bottle of wine and a warm cozy home. Next year will be a good one and I hope a wonderful one for you. It is a nice time to make plans and try to make them come true," wrote Dolores' cousin who was thinking about our New Year.

I love this Happy New Year to us, which I can't improve on no matter how hard I try.

I especially like, "It is a nice time to make plans and try to make them come true."

None of this "resolution" stuff. Too lofty. Too far up in the clouds with no feet on the path heading into 2012. Too hard to spell.

A plan is simple. I can define it. I can lay it out. I can start walking that direction. And I can spell it.

For example, a nice New Years resolution is for me to finish that GAN (Great American Novel) this year. Better, see it published in 2012. Sounds nice.

However, the plan is....see that, when I write "the plan is," I have to start thinking about how I will actually do it. How many hours a day will I spend writing it? Which days? Some days are out, because my plan for 2012 also includes driving that bus to bring home the bacon -- yeah, and some passengers too to their homes.

So, the plan. Which days are in....do I write? How many hours on each of those days? If the novel actually gets finished, how do I go about getting it published?

I'm already poking around at that last part. A good plan calls for planning ahead.

Thanks, Marion, your idea of planning rather than making a resolution is already helping. If not today's being the day to begin the plan, it's got me thinking about which day. Not today; its too far gone. Tomorrow, New Years Day, I can spend a half-hour working the plan, writing on the GAN, which by the way is not actually a Great American Novel. It's just one I've been plodding away on for a number of years. The only thing great about it so far is the length of time I've spend working on it and thinking about it.

I'm trying to make it readable, interesting, perhaps even gripping, including enough cliff hangers and with the right amount of location that readers who know the location will want to read it. Oh yes, I hope those things will motivate the right publisher to plan -- not resolve -- to publish it.

I just want to see it done, sold, and bringing in some money.

Now to turn that last sentence, which feels like a resolution, into a plan.

The plan calls for an hour a day? A half-dozen pages a day?

Great writers such as Kenneth Roberts spent hours every day writing, by longhand, by gosh, did those earlier ones, and then editing what they wrote. A long, lonely -- lonely, as in no dashing out for a hamburger and cup of coffee or walking in the woods or chatting with friends -- day. That was their plan, and they did it.

Arundel happened because Roberts kept to his plan.

I found that book at the museum at Fort Western on the banks of the Kennebec River when I was a kid. Roberts plan, which he carried out, landed in my youthful psyche as a dream. His book was the first of anything I'd ever read that interested me in history. Sorry, Miss Crook and Miss Hook, neither your fourth- nor eighth-grade history classes did that to me.

But in Arundel, I "saw" the march to Quebec happening, the terrible hardships that included the plain lousy weather, the soggy wetlands where now part of the Appalachian Trail passes on its muddy way, the defeat in Quebec, the turning of unfortunate Benedict Arnold from a loyal American military leader to disheartened lover of freedom who apparently gave up his American dream.

I understood how good writing could affect a reader.

I began to write. It helped me succeed in college, it encouraged some who read the early stuff and wrote me about their experiences in reading that stuff and so encouraged me to write more, it enabled me to teach eighth-graders who read on a first-grade level to reach their supposedly correct reading level by writing short stories for them about dogs and snowmobiles, it got me into news reporting. That eventually got me retired.

Now that I'm retired, I drive a bus. That's okay. That bus is also where some of the ideas enter my little retired-news-reporter's head before they traverse my fingers and the keyboard.

I remember one plan I developed as a reporter. Write the stupid stuff until I'm done.

I know lots of people who carry around with them a resolution to do a certain thing, such as write. Most never actually do the writing, just keep that resolution tucked away in the back of their noggins.

It needs to go from the back of the noggin to the keyboard, where the rubber meets the road and the journey actually begins. They need to write that first sentence, plan to and do it.

Thanks, Marion. This year, I plan on finishing that novel.

Later this year.

A bit later today, I plan to take a nap.

Now that's a plan.

Milt Gross can be reached for corrections, harassment, or other purposes at lesstraveledway@midmaine.com.

Milton M. Gross Copyright 2011