I’ve made new plans and started my life over more times than I thought possible.

Plans in New York, 1982. After I messed things up for myself by abandoning a perfectly good husband and thereby walking away from a primo apartment on the Upper West Side, and oh-by-the-way losing my job due to a corporate takeover, there was nothing to do but leave town in shame and disgrace. Broken and broke, I went to Los Angeles and slept on couches.

Plans in Los Angeles. 1983. I pretended I could type which meant I could qualify for temporary jobs at literary agencies and production companies. I worked for agents and producers, noticing the hundreds of scripts piling up on the desks and floors and chairs that surrounded me in these offices. Somebody had to read them all. Why not me? Turned out, I could read fast and write well. At the end of my first year in town, Bette Midler hired me to read scripts for her. Bonnie Bruckheimer and I would produce. We formed All Girl Productions, the forerunner of many production companies formed by female actors. Turned out, Bette wasn’t the only woman who wanted to develop her own material. But back then, we were the first. Bette, Bonnie, and I hit it out of the park with Beaches.

Plans in Honolulu, 2000. After producing a couple more movies, I started a family and followed my husband Frank to his gig in Hawaii (tough job but someone’s got to do it). When he quit the business and the kids started school, I taught at the university and gave writing workshops. I created Kids Talk Story, a writing program for kids of all ages, keenly effective for at-risk teens.

Plans Somewhere in the Deep South, 2021. After my caregiving duties came to an end, I started consulting again. In the Art of Story workshops, my writers and I study great films and books. They write to prompts and get feedback on their work. At the same time, we can’t help it. We get into super-serious discussions about the issues of the day, and deep, thoughtful analysis of our current feelings and interpersonal relationships. Or: we shoot the breeze and gossip about this movie star or that celebrity. Let’s face it, writers like to joke around.

Other Plans. I planned to be happily retired by this time, sitting back and watching grandchildren frolic on the beach (at my house in Malibu!). Instead, I got bored (and boring). So I coach a dozen or so writers with projects in various stages of development. I root for my writers, be they memoirists, short story writers, screenwriters, or novelists. And I’m working on my own memoir, called Other Plans. I thought of it as a project, a puzzle to solve, to see if my chaotic life made any sense at all. As Joan Didion said, “I write to find out what I think and how I feel.”

Here’s what I found out. You think you’ve got a good plan. You think you can predict the future for yourself. But while you’re making plans, life happens. So what do you do? You make other plans and keep going.

Margaret South