My entire life can be summed up

My entire life can be summed up in one sentence: Well, that didn’t go as planned.

Darynda Jones

The meaning of the quote

The job offer went to someone else. The wedding got rained out. The business that was supposed to take off in a year took 5, and the novel everyone said you should write sits in a drawer. Darynda Jones sums up all of that in a single shrug of a sentence, and nearly anyone can borrow it.

This quote works because it is funny. Jones doesn’t call her life a tragedy or a failure. She treats it like a plan that missed, which is all a plan ever is: a guess about the future that you wrote down in advance. When the guess is wrong, you can read it as a verdict on yourself or as a punchline. The quote picks the punchline.

That choice has a practical payoff. People who can laugh at a collapsed plan recover faster, because they spend less energy defending the plan and more energy deciding what comes next. The humor gives you a little distance from the mess, and distance is where clear thinking starts.

The tone fits the books Jones writes. Her Charley Davidson novels follow a private investigator in Albuquerque who also works as a grim reaper, and they treat chaos as something to joke about while still solving the case.

Psychologists who study goal setting have found that people follow through better when they plan for obstacles instead of picturing only the happy ending. The WOOP method turns that finding into a 4-step exercise. A plan that expects trouble is a plan that survives it, and a person who expects trouble can say “well, that didn’t go as planned” and keep walking. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s quote All life is an experiment, also makes a similar point about treating every miss as data.

Try this

The next time something falls apart, give yourself a short script for the first few minutes. It keeps a bad moment from growing into a bad week.

1. Say the sentence out loud.
   Tell a friend, or tell the empty room, “Well, that didn’t go as planned.” Saying it with a smile turns the failure into a story you’re allowed to tell.
2. Pick the next small move.
   Ask what you can do in the next 10 minutes. Send the email, rebook the table, rewrite the first page. The plan is gone, but the afternoon isn’t.

Jones built a career on exactly that habit, and the sentence is a good one to keep in your pocket for the days when life takes a detour.

About the author

Darynda Jones began writing at age 5, producing stories her mother had to read aloud and plays she staged for the neighborhood. As a teenager she wrote a science fiction manuscript at a local Tastee-Freez, about teens escaping through underground tunnels.

After high school she put the writing aside to build a stable life. She married a rock star and had 2 sons, and her eldest was born Deaf. The family moved to Albuquerque so he could join a specialized program, and for 7 years she and her husband lived apart during the week and saw each other on weekends.

While raising the boys she went back to college and earned a degree in Sign Language Interpreting from the University of New Mexico, graduating summa cum laude. She worked several jobs at once during those years, and she says she does not recommend having more than 3.

In 2002 she started chasing publication seriously. Her first 3 manuscripts went nowhere, and she admits they weren’t good. Then in 2009 her paranormal romance won a Golden Heart award, a prize the Romance Writers of America gives to manuscripts by unpublished authors. The win led to an agent and a 3-book deal with St. Martin’s Press.

First Grave on the Right came out in 2011, 9 years after she started taking writing seriously. A year later it won a RITA Award for Best First Book, and later books in the series reached The New York Times bestseller list.

Her sense of humor shows up in interviews too. In the podcast Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, she jokes that she has pitched her agent 47 different series ideas. Her agent also once told her she wouldn’t sell a book until Jones could turn one in on time, and Jones admits she usually hands work in a week or so late.

Jones still lives in New Mexico with her husband and sons. Her life took 9 years from her first serious attempt to a first book on the shelf, and it still never went to plan.

Resources

• Darynda Jones’s own story (Website)
• First Grave on the Right (Book)
• An Interview with Darynda Jones (Podcast)
• Darynda Jones (Wikipedia)
• WOOP Goal Setting: The 4-Step Method Backed by Research (Article)
• All life is an experiment (Article)