Which Kind Of Writer Are You: A "Pantser" Or A "Plotter?"

You’ve got a great idea for a novel, but how should you go about it? Are you a “pantser” or a “plotter?” Are you a “writing wanderer” or do you prefer a map for your writing journey?

 

(image by Glenn Carsten-Peters via unsplash.com)

First of all, let me say that every fiction author has their own method for writing novels. Do what works best for you! But after writing four fiction novels (three of which are published so far, plus my current WIPs, and a couple other books that aren’t novels), I’ve had some experience with this.

Generally speaking, the popular notion is that there are two camps: “pantsers” and “plotters.” Pantsers are writers who “write from the seat of their pants” without using any plotting at all. “Plotters” (sometimes called “planners”) are writers who outline a book ahead of time. I’ve written both ways.

As I see it, writing a novel is a journey. Plotting is like unfolding a map to guide that journey. That map guides your way so you don’t get lost along the trail, helps you choose the most efficient path and see the pitfalls, and you know your destination. But maybe you are a pantser, a sort of “writing wanderer,” preferring to explore the wilderness of your story. Getting lost along the way can be exciting, with unexpected obstacles to overcome. If so, your writing experience is not about the destination, but the journey to get there, wherever that may be.

Stephen King is a famous pantser, as he described himself in his book, On Writing, a book that is often cited as a sort of textbook on how to write novels (though about half of it is an autobiography and, frankly, King broke a lot of his own rules, particularly in his early books that made him big). He goes so far as to say, “Outlines are the last resource of bad fiction writers who wish to God they were writing masters’ theses.” Wow, okay. But he enjoys discovering the book with the characters and being surprised by the ending.

John Grisham is an example of a famous plotter. He has said, “I’m doing the outline [of my story] upfront so I always know where I’m going. I work on the outline for weeks, months, sometimes even years if I can’t get it right. But when I start the book on January the first to finish by July the first I’ve got a clear outline—I know exactly where the story’s going— I know how it’s going to end.” Given that he’s published at least 74 books (about as many as King), 47 of which have made the New York Times Bestsellers list (King has had only about half as many), it sort of blows away King’s statement that he’s a “bad fiction writer” because he makes outlines.

In fact, King and Grisham had an online discussion with each other that included this very topic. King asked Grisham if he ever wrote himself into “a blind alley,” and Grisham responded quickly: “No.  I don’t write the first scene until I write the last scene.  So I always know where I’m going.” This must have made King’s head explode, since in On Writing he likened this to “eating dessert first.”

As far as I can tell, the term “pantser” may have come about from NaNoWriMo, an annual event where writers attempt to write a draft of a novel in just a month. From their website: “National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to creative writing.” Who has time to do careful plotting when you only have a month to write a book, after all? (Personally, I can’t imagine being able to write a quality book in such a short amount of time, even as a draft, in part because I have a 50 hour work week dayjob and a life outside of writing, too. But I digress.).

When I wrote my first novel (which is still unpublished), I was a pantser. I had a great idea for the start and some general ideas of what I wanted to have happen in scenes throughout. I had some characters in mind, too. But for the most part, I just let the ideas flow. Pantsing is a free-form storytelling. You, as the author, let the characters and action guide the story. You’re along for the ride, exploring the plot as it develops, which makes the process of writing more fun, at least at first. You’re as surprised as your readers will be when the plot twists. You get started writing quicker. The ending is an exciting discovery! I experienced all of these things as I wrote mine, and it was really interesting to see where the story went.

The problem with pantsing, though, is that you can’t see around the corner. Without knowing what’s coming, you can’t build in foreshadowing. You can’t develop the characters, plan the setting, or place important items along the way. You can’t as easily build up to events. This can lead to what writers call “the messy middle” – a situation where the plot and subplots just seem to fizzle or go astray, and you have trouble bringing them together, sometimes resulting in writer’s block. And the ending can fall flat. Coincidentally, Stephen King is often criticized for having poor endings. I wonder if this is why. The book I wrote as a pantser also had a “messy middle”, years to write, and it took far too many words to bring it all together. In fact, the first draft was a whopping 220,000 words! (I eventually pared it down to about 122,000 in a later draft). I think the ending was good, but maybe it wouldn’t be satisfying to everyone. It was bittersweet.

A hybrid approach is to write a synopsis or a partial outline. This would include a beginning and ending, significant scenes you expect along the way, and character descriptions. When I wrote my second book, which became Dragon of the Federation, a high fantasy novel, I used this hybrid approach. I basically wrote out a one-page synopsis with paragraphs describing the important scenes and characters. I had a defined beginning and ending, and the scenes acted as crucial stepping stones along the way. This approach worked pretty well, but I had to be very careful along the way to make sure everything came together, particularly since it was told from two different points of view. It took me years to write it. At some point in the middle, I wound up making a more careful outline using Microsoft Word in order to keep it all coherent. That was the moment I realized the full strength of proper outlining. Once I made it, the story came together in a much more seamless way and the writing went much quicker.

Plotting involves making an outline of each chapter. But even before that, it’s a good idea to write a one-page synopsis, or even an “elevator speech” (one or two sentences on what the book is about, as if you were describing it to someone during a short elevator ride), to summarize the book and it’s important concepts. The outline might be as simple as a short description of each chapter, or it might be as thorough as carefully describing each character’s motivations and actions, character arcs, settings, and how they weave into subplots. Again, everyone is different.

The third novel I completed became The First Nova I See Tonight, a fun science fiction space opera novel. By this time I had a lot of real-world experience with writing and had a better idea of what worked best for me. From the very start, I began with an “elevator speech.” Then I wrote a general outline of the book, chapter by chapter, each with a short paragraph of the character actions and story plot. After spending some time trying to visualize the book as a sort of movie in my head, I then created an Excel document with each of those chapters as a separate line and a few sentences of what was going to happen in each chapter. Since this was a fast-paced novel with lots of action, I wanted shorter chapters and a shorter overall length, so I aimed at an average of about 2000 words per chapter. This gave me an idea of how many chapters for a final length of around 80,000 words (in the end, I was just under that at about 79,000). Once I had that groundwork done, I started writing the book. I found that the outline was tremendously helpful. Even while working a full time job and having an active lifestyle, I still wrote the draft in about a year. Writing it was lots of fun, I didn’t have the “messy middle” problem, and the ending came together smoothly on the first try. I wasn’t rigid about my outline, however. I allowed flexibility, moving chapters around a bit, combining or separating chapters, and allowing the characters to develop in their own ways, which changed the outline a bit as I went.

An excerpt from the "visual outline"
I created for Footman of the Ether.

The fourth novel I published, Footman of the Ether, a sequel to Dragon of the Federation, also used this plotting method. It, too, went more quickly. The outlining helps pace the book and judge the length. But because it was told from four points of view (POV), I had an additional outline: a “visual outline.” This visual outline was a color-coded guide of how the four character viewpoints weaved through the novel. See the image attached here. Trust me when I tell you that involving multiple POVs makes the writing of the story much more difficult, as it requires careful balance. I doubt I’ll ever do more than four in one book, for this reason. The challenges of writing multiple POVs is a topic for a future blog post.

In another later blog post I will go into more detail on my current plotting method. For now, though, I hope this article gives you a good idea of the differences between pantsing and plotting, and a hybrid of the two, and their pros and cons.

 

Cheers and happy writing!