Tag Archives: pantsing

Technique

P is for plotting (and pantsing)

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Personally, I think there’s a wide spectrum when it comes to whether or not you outline before you write. Yes, okay, having an outline or not having an outline is pretty cut-and-dried, but there are a lot of in betweens:

  • An idea for an opening
  • An idea for a beginning and a middle
  • An idea for a beginning, a middle and an end (a mental outline, perhaps?)
  • Ideas for several major guideposts in the story (written down?), with room to figure out how to move between them
  • A written outline of the major guideposts and all the transitions between them.
  • A chapter-by-chapter synopsis of the story.
  • A scene-by-scene spreadsheet, possibly including dialogue, setting, exposition.

Once upon a time, I was at the pantser (as in “by the seat of your pants”) end of the spectrum. And my stories were often a mess. (Winchester Mystery Story, anyone?) Whether or not they’d turn out all right was hit-or-miss.

Then I got into a larger project: parallel novels written simultaneously with a friend. We had to work to coordinate our timelines. There was no way to pants this without ruining one another’s books. I broke down and plotted. And to my surprise, it was even better than pantsing!

But while I’m definitely a plotting convert, I’m not a hard-core-plan-every-scene-to-the-final-detail kind of writer. Like pantsers (and probably most plotters to some extent), I need at least a little discovery and creativity to make drafting fun for me. I’m still experimenting at how much discovery vs. planning I need—my last draft was a little short on the planning. It wasn’t until I sat down and figured out my path in a little more detail that I could finish the book. (And I’m going to need to add some more structure in some parts—that darn sagging middle!)

So where do you fall? How did you come to be a plotter or pantser?

Photo by fracacta

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Technique

Making it up as she went along–the Winchester Mystery Story

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Larry Brooks, “the story fixer,” had a recent post that really got me thinking about this—Story Structure vs. Story Architecture: “Dude… what’s the diff?”

All stories, says Brooks, have structure. And, to employ my own analogy, so do all buildings. But not all buildings are created equal:

Winchester Mystery House Scary Exterior Tower

Winchester Mystery House Stairs to the ceiling

winchester mystery house

You might recognize this place, or the legend behind it. The owner believed that her house must be under construction always, or she would die. But they couldn’t use a master building plan.

Considering that, the Winchester Mystery House is pretty well-built. Yeah, it has stairs that lead to nowhere and doors that open out from the second floor (no stairs on that one—maybe move those first stairs over there?). It’s fun—it’s a blast to explore, and I bet Sarah Winchester had an awesome time throwing in every element she could think of.

It has a decent foundation—instead of leveling it, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake only knocked off the top three stories. After the quake it stood four stories. The remaining structure is a rambling, 160-room, 4.5-acre mansion. It required more than 20,000 gallons of paint—and it constantly needed painting.

I think we’ve all gotten to the end of a story, looked back and seen our own Winchester Mystery Structure. The Winchester Mystery House has structure. In some sense, it has architecture—but not really. There is no plan, and the closest thing they had to a designer (architect) was a crazy woman.

And “rambling” is right. Dead ends, doors and promises that go nowhere, accidental MacGuffins. . . . After round 28,657 of revisions, I got tired of writing stories that looked like they were designed by a crazy woman.

What do you think? Have you ever written a “Winchester Mystery Story”?

Photo credits: exterior shot and stairs to nowhere courtesy of the Winchester Mystery House; rooves—the_photographer; windows to windows—Emily Hoyer

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Technique

An “organic” story

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This entry is part 2 of 24 in the series The plot thickens (Mwahahaha)

Yesterday, I shared my experience with my “conversion” to plotting. And it turns out I wasn’t alone. As Katie pointed out, it seems like most of us had the same problem:

starting out as a pantster, realizing that writing-by-the-seat-of-our-pants exposes our weak areas, and realizing that plotting is necessary to some degree.

flying fingersI think that the mystique of the organic story, one that is so perfect and beautiful that it just wrote itself, is one of the big things that convinced a lot of us (or all of us) to become pantsers (and maybe even writers). There’s this romantic notion that “real” writers, “great” writers sit down and pound out a fabulous story, with minimal rewriting and never, no never, no never any planning in advance.

And then we try it—and somehow it doesn’t seem to work. We learn more about plotting, and give that a try—and lo and behold, we have story arcs. We have a non-sagging middle. We have a character changing and growing through the climax and resolution.

Granted, these don’t always automatically fall in line with plotting and planning—but often when we start a story with these things in mind, we are more mindful of them not only in the planning but in the writing, and look for opportunities to help our characters grow and change, to continually challenge them. (Or, as I like to put it, to put the screws to them.)

So, our mission (should you choose to accept it!) for this series is to look at the whys (for the unconvinced) and the hows of plotting. I’d also love to get some guest posts on how individuals put plotting to work for them—so if you’d like to volunteer to give a brief overview of your plotting process, let me know! (And stay tuned for a new free guide on Friday!)

What do you think? How can learning about plotting help you? Do you think you’ll ever go back to pantsing?

Flying fingers by The Hamster Factor

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