Debatable: Plot It, or Pants It?

Not All Those Who Wander-Write Are Lost …

Ray Rhamey

Do you “write by the seat of your pants”? Do you create your narrative organically, intuitively? If you aren’t sure, here’s a terrific definition of a pantser from blogger Paul Liadis:

So what are the hallmarks—or, perhaps, symptoms—that distinguish a pantser from a plotter? How does a pantser write differently from an architectural writer who builds a complete framework before tackling the creation of the novel itself?

1. You don’t outline or plot ahead. You’ve been known to think, If I do, then I know what happens and all the fun is gone. Why bother writing it if you already know what happens? Moreover, the surprises of discovery you encounter when you write are the same ones your readers will feel as they read.
2. Your characters sometimes arrive unannounced, and they shape themselves. You discover who they are as they do what they do on your pages.
3. Your characters have the power to take your story in a direction you didn’t foresee or imagine. You often follow rather than lead. A “disposable” character in the opening of one of my novels, who served as cannon fodder to help characterize the hero, followed the protagonist after their encounter. She became the second-most-important character in the story and has a huge impact on what happens in the novel.
4. What happens—that is, plot—grows organically from your characters’ decisions. These choices deal with conflict and fulfill their desires, which you then see and transcribe.
5. You write—and sometimes don’t write—by “feel.” Certainly all artists make decisions on what feels right, but a plotter’s methods and reasons for doing so are much different than a pantser’s. A plotter might decide a particular plot twist feels right at a certain point, while a pantser might decide whether what a character wants to do feels right.

If you enjoy these same hallmarks in your writing, welcome to the pantser tribe.

MEET YOUR WRITERLY KINFOLK

A number of best-selling writers, both past and present, have managed quite well by pantsing.

Elmore Leonard

Leonard once said, “I don’t put a lot of time in on my plots. I like to make it up as I go along. No outline at all.” Yep, he was a pantser, all right. Did it for thirty years, intuiting his way to more than forty published novels. Leonard described his process this way:

Tess Gerritsen

Best-selling thriller author Tess Gerritsen says her characters rise up organically. Detective Rizzoli was going to be killed off the first time she appeared, but she survived and became half of the famous duo Rizzoli and Isles. Tess has stayed with those characters because, as she says, “I want to know what’s happening in their lives.” Note that she doesn’t say she wants to tell us what’s happening; she wants to learn for herself. She says her writing process is “completely chaotic.”

Stephen King

One of the things pantsing can do is relieve the anxiety that can come with facing the Brobdingnagian undertaking of writing “a novel,” because you only deal with writing a page or a scene, which are much smaller tasks nowhere near as off-putting as an entire book. King writes massive novels—Under the Dome is 1,072 pages, more than 336,000 words—but he doesn’t have to deal with holding the whole gargantuan story in his mind. As he says:

J.R.R. Tolkien

It appears that even Tolkien, the master of immense fantasy, was at least a partial pantser. In his foreword to The Fellowship of the Ring, Tolkien wrote, “This tale grew in the telling …” He later clarified, “As the story grew it put down roots (into the past) and threw out unexpected branches: but its main theme was settled from the outset …”

As I pursue a character’s story, the past that motivates what happens also becomes “known” to me. On the unexpected entrance of a character in a story, Tolkien also reported: “A new character has come on the scene (I am sure I did not invent him, I did not even want him, but there he came walking through the woods of Ithilien): Faramir, the brother of Boromir.”

If you’re a pantser, you’re in great company.

LISTEN TO YOUR INTUITION

Do pantsers struggle when they take on the monstrous task of writing 80,000 to 100,000 words (or even more) without an outline? Without a plan? Actually, no, they’re probably enjoying the journey because they’ve learned how to conquer the challenges of pantsing.

Making False Starts

Elmore Leonard once told readers at a bookstore that after drafting one hundred pages or so, he would revisit what he’d written and sometimes decide that a minor character was more interesting than he had imagined and should be the protagonist.

Self-Editing

As you might guess, organic writers put a lot of stuff on the page during the process of discovery that might not belong in the story. The pantser’s first draft requires plenty of editing and rewriting.

Here’s a word of advice from Steven James, author of Story Trumps Structure, that I follow in my editing and writing: “If it’s in the story, it must matter. If it doesn’t matter, delete it.” (Steven shares more advice in his essay “Letting Go of the Reins” in Part V.)

Wise words for any writer, whether pantser or plotter. But sometimes the difficulty is in seeing what actually matters. Many writers get their keyboards slapped for all the backstory they include in the openings of their novels. They argue that “the reader needs to know that.” Not necessarily so. The way to judge what matters is to see how it affects the story. If taking it out doesn’t change the story, well, your keyboard has a handy delete key, right?

Getting Stuck

Organic writers sometimes follow a story’s trail into a blind alley. Or perhaps it’s not actually blind—it’s that the writer just can’t see what happens next. In my writing, I’ve learned to relax and just step away for hours or days—whatever it takes—and let my “back burner” discover what the story’s future holds.

But if your back burner seems truly stymied, James offers two questions you can ask of your story that I’ve found very useful in my own pantsing:

1. What can go wrong?
2. How can things get worse?

When a story confronts a character with the answers to those questions, she reacts and does things that lead to more things going wrong and getting worse. Since those events stem from the character, they are natural, organic evolutions of the story.

Keeping Details Straight

Organic writers, hounding after the scent of a character, may become so wrapped up in the hunt that they lose track of what other characters are doing. That might not matter so much in a first-person narrative, but losing track of characters can have an impact in a third-person story with more than one point-of-view character.

So keep a record of what’s happened so far, to whom it happened, and where it happened in the story timeline. I’ve found it helpful to create a table in Word or Excel with column headings such as Chapter, POV Character, Action, and Other Characters. After you write a chapter, record who, what, when, and where. The POV Character column will clue you if you’ve neglected a character for too long. The Action column will be a handy reference for what motivates action in the future—and for where you need to go back and change things in order to set up an unexpected twist later in the story.

DO WHAT WORKS FOR YOU

There is no right way to write a novel. A writer who outlines the plot of his narrative first may actually be the envy of a pantser who knows she faces a serious editing task because of the potential side trips that might pop up during her wander. As a pantser, I hope that plotters also feel a sense of discovery when they build the storyline.

When I read a novel, I can’t usually tell if the author was a plotter or a pantser, and, frankly, I don’t give a damn. Just give me a good read!