A Conversation Between a Plotter and a Pantser

Anne: Obviously pantsing works for you, Ray. Did you come to that through trial and error, or was it a natural fit?

Ray: It’s a natural approach for me, perhaps because of my many years in advertising prior to tackling novels. A print ad concept or a television commercial script is so short that coming up with an idea from scratch is natural and easy. You just go with the flow. Because they’re so brief, discarding a lot of notions is no big deal. What about outlining for you?

Anne: I definitely came to it through trial and error. I’d always outlined academic papers and legal briefs for work, but when I was starting out in fiction, it weirdly never occurred to me to outline a creative project. As a result, I’d always get these fantastically beautiful opening scenes and then sit back and go, Uh … now what? Lots of false starts. It wasn’t until I worked out the story in advance that I ever got anywhere toward finishing something.

Ray: I admire all writers who can finish a novel; it’s such a giant task. I’ve gotten to a point where I can complete a first draft in fewer than six months. I pantsed my novel, The Vampire Kitty-cat Chronicles, by writing just one morning a week. It took fifty-three weeks, but that was only fifty-three days of actual writing, so more like two months total.

Anne: Wow, to me, it’s amazing that you can do that without an outline. The quickest first draft—and I’m truly talking first draft—I did was for Girl Last Seen, and that was because I had a co-author. We wrote the first draft in five weeks. On my own it’s about two months of daily writing to get to a first draft. And then, of course, several more months for editing and revision. Do your first drafts typically include false starts?

Ray: I do encounter false starts, but they are never frustrating, just part of the process. For my novel Hiding Magic, I started it three times with a male protagonist, but it just wouldn’t come alive. Then I realized that it was the female protagonist’s story, and it immediately took off when I slipped into her point of view. Have you ever found that a character has led you away from your original plan, plot-wise? I would think that once you’ve committed so much time to your outline, you’d resist change.

Anne: I haven’t had a character lead me away from my plot outline, per se, but as I get to know the characters better, sometimes their motivations change. So while they may end up doing the same thing, my explanation for why they choose to do it sometimes changes.

Ray: Right. So much of that comes from the character’s backstory. Do you work out a complete backstory for your main character prior to writing a novel?

Anne: Not a complete backstory. I have an idea as to what kind of family he comes from, as well as his biggest fear and where it comes from. Then, as I get to know my character better through the writing process—his dialogue in particular—I go back and fill in some of the finer details. For example, I may start out knowing that a character is desperate to belong because she was abandoned as a child, but it may not be until further down the road that I realize why that abandonment happened. How about you? What kind of backstory work do you do?

Ray: Most of my backstory evolves as I go, although in the run-up to starting a novel, I will write pages of notes that may include bits of backstory—but those early notes often go by the wayside when I discover what really happened. I start with a character’s nowstory—what she does, what her situation is. As I need it, her history seems ready for me to tap into when I think about what is motivating her. The one thing I try to have up front is a character’s “ghost,” an event in his past that haunts him, affects what he does, and can lead to inner conflict.

In one of my novels, Jewel, a woman who was a disposable character used as a prop to set up the protagonist’s abilities, decided to take a much bigger role in the story and eventually became second only to the protagonist in determining what happened. I started with her buying a drug for her addicted brother. That was all I knew at the time. Then, in a bit of internal monologue where she thinks of what her mother said about being tough, I immediately knew that her mother was dead. I then discovered the character had raised her little brother after their mother had been killed in a mugging eleven years before. That backstory just bubbled up when I thought about the character as she took part in the story.

At the 2014 Writer Unboxed UnConference, author Meg Rosoff talked about writers having a more direct connection between the conscious and unconscious minds. I believe that’s what works for me and other pantsers—my conscious pantsing taps the unconscious part of my mind and finds backstory elements somehow ready and waiting.

Anne: That gets us back to your earlier question about whether, as a plotter, I resist changing my original plans. I think that question raises a valid point. While I hope that I’ve thought my story through enough at the beginning to make changes unnecessary, I would never resist a change that will clearly make the story better.

Ray: What’s an example of your plan not working out?

Anne: Well … my first published book (Lies Beneath) was sold with one ending, but when a film agent got on board, he suggested that I rewrite the ending because it would never work onscreen. Specifically, he said I had to have my hero and villain in the pivotal scene together—rather than miles apart as I had written it. Even though the likelihood of a movie is very slim, I changed course because I could see that his suggestion boosted the conflict. I took that lesson to heart and have applied it to my subsequent novels.

Ray: I think that whether you’re a plotter or a pantser, a professional is willing to develop and improve on the things that work and is willing to try new techniques before discarding them outright.

Pro Tip

I worked on Blackbirds for about five years but never really finished it. I never could—the story wandered like a person lost at the mall. When the time came that I finally learned outlining—a skill taught through a screenwriting mentorship—I knew I had to scrap everything and start over. Outlining was the governing principle. I had to learn how to think about the story from start to finish, not just wander through it. I am a pantser by heart but a plotter by necessity.