All writers are pantsers at some point, because we’re all making stuff up. Even planners – planning is just making stuff up ahead of using it in a first draft, instead of making it up in the draft and then revising it. Everybody starts with a huge empty space, and has to fill it.
Creativity needs that space.
But empty space is … invisible. Empty. This makes it really easy to overlook, especially when trying to explain to someone else How To Do This. “Begin by making a list of characters.” “Start by writing down your idea as a log line.” “Decide on a location.” “Lay out your plot in three acts.” None of those things can happen until the writer has made up some characters to put on the list, come up with an idea or a plot, thought of places/settings to decide among. A lot of writing advice ignores this step.
A lot of the metaphors we use make it even easier to overlook that one crucial step. Writing is like building a wall, throwing a pot, cooking, stringing beads, putting together a jigsaw puzzle … but in real life, if you don’t have the raw materials, you have to order them, find them, grow them, collect them. You can’t just say “I need some clay to make a pot with – abracadabra!” and poof, there is some clay for you to work with.
All writers have to start by creating the materials they’re going to work with – the people, places, things, and events that eventually form the story. The timing and the order in which those things get made up varies wildly from writer to writer, because a lot of it depends on how the writer works with that invisible, empty space that we all start with.
For some writers, the enormousness of the totally empty space is an exciting challenge. Inching out into the void is a sort of adrenaline rush; the joy of writing, for them, is watching the characters, the world, the story materialize in front of them, like the twilight flowing from the hands of the King of Elfland’s daughter carrying Elfland into the fields we know. The less they start with, the better.
For a lot of us, the very first thing we do with all that empty possibility is to fill in bits of it, giving it a hint of a shape. We place voluntary limits on what we are going to put in this story, because creativity often works best within limits. Choice paralysis is easier to overcome if one doesn’t have quite so many choices.
Creativity still requires space, just not an infinite amount of it. But since writers are different, we don’t all require the same kind of creative space in the same places. I, for instance, work best when I have a large chunk of the worldbuilding and/or backstory laid down early. I know that whatever I have planned for my plot will shift and change as I work, but if I say there’s a mountain to the east, there is by George a mountain there, and if I say there was a war two centuries ago that only lasted twelve hours … well, it was probably more complicated than that, because wars are, but there was definitely a war, and it was definitely very, very short … and within five minutes, I’ll have made up both the “real” history of the Half-Day War and the version that has come down to my present-day characters. Even if it has nothing whatever to do with my current plot.
One of my dear friends, however, needs space in her backstory and worldbuilding. When she throws out a term like “the Half-Day War,” it just shows up in conversation; she neither needs nor wants to know more details, unless they’re relevant to the current plot. As she starts a book, the What Has Gone Before part is very lightly sketched on her mental landscape. What comes first, for her, are her characters. She doesn’t know absolutely everything about them before she starts writing, but she knows far more than I do about who they are, how they feel, and what they are like than I know about mine at the start of a book.
Because the importance of leaving space tends to get overlooked, some writers get themselves into trouble by not leaving enough space, or by leaving it in the wrong (for them) places. Overcontrolling the details – whether we’re talking plot twists or character traits, setting or theme – can make it impossible to get a story to flow smoothly, the same way that trying to control a bat or golf club on a conscious, nanosecond by nanosecond basis makes it impossible to get a smooth swing.
Analytical writers are particularly prone to this problem; we tend to want to nail down as much as we possibly can, assuming that careful pre-design will make the actual writing-the-draft part easier. Too often, the actual effect is one of choking off a seedling before it can get established and grow.
Lack of space can be difficult to correct. Most folks resist giving up something they’ve put a ton of work into. Letting go of events, or characters, or planned plot twists can stall a writer for months, even when it’s obvious that they should be jettisoned.
One can get into trouble by leaving too much space for oneself, of course, but that’s usually easier to fix. Making up more stuff is something that has to happen eventually, after all.
Finding a balance between trying to do too much pre-planning and not doing enough is a medium-hard problem for me.
A Big Problem is the imbalance of stuff when I try to fill empty space. It’s like [reaches for a metaphor] having buckets of beads but no string, and when I try to score some string I generally end up with even more buckets of beads instead.
Or to put it another way, I can wave my author-wand and invoke the characters, institutions, artifacts, and events of a magical foreign realm, but not any story. I have no plot skeletons (and I must scream). It’s all invertebrate chronicles lacking any plot-backbone or story-nature.
“Most folks resist giving up something they’ve put a ton of work into. Letting go of events, or characters, or planned plot twists can stall a writer for months”
Gosh, I can’t identify with this at all. [cough]
I often begin with a snippet of conversation or a very brief scene (lots of creative space to work in), and I go backward or forward from that springboard to discover what the story is about.
Predictably, I come to a point where I either work in my little snippet or, to my great dismay, find it impossible to shoehorn it into the narrative. But I keep trying and trying, regardless of how inappropriate including it has become.
But getting rid of is somehow equally impossible. Because I wrote it (and especially because it was a germinating atom), it wants to persist, as stubborn as a matrix of rebar welded together, deep in long-set concrete.
It should be a simple thing, but I have to find a clear way to deal with it.
This is just brilliant.
It can help to design in some empty space from the beginning. If I’m devising a D&D campaign or a future history, I try to design it so it can accommodate a lot of possibilities — so that later on when I’m trying to fit something in, there’ll be room for it.
There’s another trick that sometimes works. If I’ve got two conflicting ideas, and as Wolf says, I don’t want to give up either of them, I can try asking the kind of question you’d use in a mathematical existence proof: What hypothetical situation *could* make these two things fit together? Under what conditions could I have my cake and eat it too? If there is such a solution, it may well create the kind of tortuous complexity that can make the story distinctive and interesting.
Agreed! And thank you for the proof simile! I’ve definitely done those how-do-I-reconcile-these-apparently-mutually-exclusive-situations-to-save-this-scene mental gymnastics before, but had no good description for that process (as is probably clear from the hyphenated mess of a phrase I just wrote). I’m not sure that my results are always convincing, but the process is always entertaining and good for several bus trips’ worth of daydreaming (at least), and occasionally I come up with a solution that actually seems to improve the overall story.
Wolf Lahti: Lots of things are simple but really difficult to force oneself to actually do – walking off of a cliff, eating the dinner that you’ve accidentally dumped about a half-cup of hot mustard powder into, killing off a character whom one’s critique group says isn’t necessary to the story instead of using increasingly implausible plot twists to keep that character alive – so, much empathy…
Deep Lurker: Ouch. As an exercise, maybe arrange the beads (scenes? vignettes?) into a pattern and see if readers invent connections between them, whether you put the connections there or not? (I’m tempted to take the invertebrate metaphor way too far and call that a rudist-bivalve-reef style of story, but, uh, that may be because it’s almost three in the morning here, so never mind.)
On the other hand, sometimes the clay shows up on the wheel exactly when you didn’t need another pot.
When she throws out a term like “the Half-Day War,” it just shows up in conversation; she neither needs nor wants to know more details, unless they’re relevant to the current plot.
Yes yes yes, this!
Sometimes those things will become important later, and if so, I’ll get the details when I need them. But sometimes they’re just there because… they’re there.
I often begin with a snippet of conversation or a very brief scene
And also this!
I dunno, it’s late and I’m low on brain. I’m just happy to see bits of writing process that I can identify with.