Graphic by Peg Ihinger
In the writing field, people who “just sit down and write” are named pantsers (as in, writing by the seat of their pants), in contrast to planners, who supposedly write bucketfuls of notes beforehand.
Reality, in my experience, is a bit different. First off, in my experience there are very few “true” pantsers and “true” planners. It’s more of a scale, where the ratio between how much advance planning and how much shows up during the writing process varies, depending on the writer’s fundamental process. Second, that ratio also varies from story to story…and it’s frequently not obvious why.
Even for writers who consider themselves planners (or pantsers), different books can demand different approaches, and one doesn’t always find out what something needs until one’s normal process doesn’t seem to be working. I consider myself a planner, but Talking to Dragons was pure pantsing. Really pure. Sorcery and Cecelia was also unplanned, because that’s part of the rules of the game.
The rest of the time, I’ve had lots of notes, mostly on background and possible plot. Half of the plot stuff never gets used because I think of something better when I’m writing. Usually, the plot summary is about five pages and the notes run another ten or so.
The new WIP has thirty-eight single-spaced pages of notes on the city’s history, government, politics, major characters’ backgrounds and issues, and overall plot arc, plus a two-page timeline covering significant events over 1400 years plus character milestones over 56 years (that’s the age of the oldest main character). I also have four single-space pages of moderately detailed plot outline broken up into chapters, and an Excel file that breaks down plot/character arcs. Oh, and another five single-spaced pages of notes on the magic system. It’s far more than I’ve ever had at this point in the process, but this book really needs every bit of it.
And I’ve already had two conversations go sideways and one totally unplanned character show up out of nowhere. And there’s a second new character showing up in the next totally unplanned chapter.
Which is all a long-winded way of saying that nearly every writer does some planning and some pantsing at some point, regardless of what their normal working process is. Since there’s already lots of stuff lying around the internet on planning, I’m going to talk a bit about things I have found helpful when I’m pantsing.
One of the techniques I’ve personally found helpful is layering. Pantsing, for me, is about getting things down in the heat of the moment. When that happens, I’m not trying to write a whole fleshed-out scene. Usually, I’m starting with a conversation (or, if it’s more of an action scene, the blocking for the key actions). This lets me grab the important things in a deliberately imperfect way, without feeling as if I have to get everything else down, too.
Once I have the sketch draft down, I go back and methodically put in the missing bits, one layer at a time. The order of the layers doesn’t matter—I do whatever I’m most certain of first. In a dialog scene, that’s usually either tone of voice or my POV character’s emotions; in an action scene, it’s usually the POV’s emotions or physical sensations.
Another extremely useful tool (for me) has been the ongoing reverse outline. Basically, I set up two documents, one headed “New Book//Chapter 1” and one headed “New Book—OUTLINE//Chapter 1-Scene 1-Day 1 (time of day)”. I start writing in the first document. When I finish a scene or a chapter, I stop and write a summary of the key events in the outline file, including where it happened and when it happened relative to Day 1, which is when the story starts.
Initially, this feels annoying and possibly pointless. However, I find it much easier to spot structural problems when I have the structure laid out in a summary form, and that’s what this does. I don’t put anything in the second file except summaries of scenes that have actually been written. When I add a new scene or finish a chapter, I look it over to check that everything makes sense. It’s sort of like planting rows of trees, and then stepping back to look at a picture of the forest to make sure everything is ending up in the right place.
As the book (and the outline) gets longer, I can see at a glance where there are eight chapters in a row labeled “Day 4,” which lets me check whether I’m having too many things happening on one day or not. (Sometimes, one day really is that insanely busy…but if it is, then I know my characters and readers are going to need a chance to catch their breath afterwards.)
Finally, my personal experience with pantsing is that it tempts me to write all the fun bits first, and leave the tricky parts for the end. For instance, I’ll get to the end of a fun action bit and think, “OK, there needs to be a bit here where George thinks about what just happened and decides what to do next, but I don’t want to write that now.” So I add a note saying, “George decides to go to Paris” and then skip ahead to the fun bit in Paris. The trouble is that when I go back to write the “George thinks and then decides” scene, I can’t let George just think and see what happens. I know what happens: he decides to go to Paris. So I resist any interesting digressions that don’t lead him toward Paris, and the scene sometimes ends up feeling flat. It makes the whole process much more difficult than I think it ought to be.
The only suggestions I have for that issue are 1) resist the temptation to skip, so that George can randomly decide to go to Shanghai if the thinking scene works out that way, or 2) write the fun stuff first, with minimal transitions, accepting that some of those scenes are either going to have to be thoroughly rewritten or not used at all, or 3) write the fun stuff as really incomplete sketch drafts instead of whole scenes, so that I can see how things fit together, and then go back, put everything in order, and flesh it all out.
I’ve always contended that planning and pantsing are really the same process, just with different levels of detail. A planner typically constructs an outline and fills in the details later; a pantser just fills in all the details while outlining.
I get it about a mix of pantsing and plotting: “Yeah, that’s me.”
Whenever you bring up layering I think “I ought to try that.” And my back-brain glares at me, ready to wave arms and shout “YOU MAY NOT DO THAT THING!”
Eric S. Raymond recently posted a tweet (X-post) that touches on this. In it he notes that he’s a pantser and eagerly looked at a how-to-write book recommended for pantsers. Only to find it disappointing because the “pantser problems” it addressed weren’t his problems at all. His big problem is one that sounded very familiar to me:
“Where I fall down is plot. Specifically, the challenge of generating sufficient drama that my short story or book won’t just be a boring tour through a static setting.”
https://x.com/esrtweet/status/2072335282926743728
I pants my outlines. Sometimes I discover I did it too loosely and have to do more structural work in the draft.
I definitely sketch, flesh out, reorder, gap fill as my primary methods, so layering is a good description of that. Considering step 1 though is usually I randomly dreamed up a world and most of my sketches start out for the world, then I hit critical mass of relateds that ‘starts’ a story, impossible to say how much ‘planning.’ Definitely no outlining. I arrange scenes, however sketchy, never just ideas of scenes.
An author at an event I was recently at (5 mystery writers, 4 of whom are some variety of pantser) asserted, “Everyone’s a pantser, you [the one devout outliner] just write a really rough, short first draft.”
For me, pantsing does involve writing whole fleshed-out scenes; it’s the only way I can write. Layering sounds cool, but it kicks off the same NO DO NOT WANT response from my brain that cold outlining does — maybe more so. It is, after all, a form of outlining: sketch out the rough progression of what happens, go back and fill in the details later.
The ongoing reverse outline, however, is a tool I embrace, more so as the brain gets older and the body of work taking up brain cells gets larger. Mine is a lot less detailed, because I’m going to have to go back and reread the text anyway if I have a question; how I said the thing is as important, for me, as what I said. But the reverse outline saves me having to hunt for where I said it. And I’ve definitely used that tool for a de facto timeline; keeping track of the flow of time does not come naturally to me, and it saves me from writing “When she’d started this quest two weeks ago…” when it’s actually only been four days.
A really really rough first draft — well, as a plotter, I described my outlines as such at an SF con panel years ago.
What works for you, works for you.
I, however, cannot convince myself that a five page summary is “a really short first draft” of a novel. I cannot even convince myself that the movie-script-dialog version is a rough draft of a novel. (Maybe of a movie script, though.)
Layering…if it doesn’t work, then it doesn’t. The one thing I can think of there, though, is that maybe you’re starting with the wrong layer? “Sketch out the rough progression of events” is ONE layer, and I suppose the “talking heads movie script” could be a version of that, but it’s perfectly possible to start with the emotional arc and have NO IDEA what the events are that drive it. Also, I find layering to be most useful at the scene level, not as trying to lay out the whole novel in advance. YMMV
I like the “scale” or continuum point. I call myself a planner, but there’s always a good deal of looseness in the outline when I start writing.
The outline gets filled in gradually as I write, making notes forward as the current writing suggests new things for later on, or just thinking ahead about what will come next. That way it’s less likely that you come to a complete standstill, but also less likely that you have to go back up and rip up a lot of previous work because you had no idea where it would be leading. Maybe this should be called a “surfing” approach: you’re riding the crest of the wave as you write, but also looking forward at where you’re going.
If you want the world in your story to feel lived-in, one that’s been around for a long time, consider sketching out some kind of history. When was magic developed? I’ve done anything from in the stone age to a generation or two before Beowulf.
Have there been recent technological developments? New techniques discovered? Allusions to those can give the world depth.
If travel distances are going to matter, or how long it takes to get from here to there, maybe put together some kind of map, just for your own benefit. You can of course make it up as you go.
Or, hey, don’t. Whatever works for you.
It gets interesting, balancing the use of this to infodump relevant knowledge, and just filling in the background. Too clearly using everything your character learns makes the world unreal, but too much irrelevance is clutter.
Absolutely.
Having a lot of background info to deepen the world can really help; dumping it on the reader…well, better do carefully…
(“As you know, Bob, I studied the history of this region for quite a few years, and prepared a number of lectures on the topic. Here’s the longest one…”)
I love the outline idea but I think I struggle with tension specifically. My current approach (and the only one that’s worked for me to *write and finish things* so far) is to start at the beginning and write all the way through, fully writing it out, not a sketch. I don’t have any issues with pacing in terms of things happening out of order or all in one day this way, because I’m living the story with the characters! But I do have issues with maintaining tension appropriately; for instance, if the true inciting incident shows up 8 chapters in, what do you even do with that? Do you cut a lot of the earlier chapters? Do you move it earlier?
Rearranging plot points is really hard for me, maybe I just need more practice – or maybe it’s hard for everyone and I just have to suck it up! I think very linearly so I can easily do linear edits where I read through and insert lines or scenes as necessary, but keeping everything in my head to rearrange seems so very intimidating. Maybe that’s where the reverse outline comes in? I imagine that would help a lot.
Rearranging plot points is something I never did–and never needed to do–until I was over twenty years into my writing career. It comes up more when the plot is more modular than linear, or when the writer’s process is of the pile-up-a-bunch-of-random-scenes-then-sort-them-out variety. If you’re a linear writer, you probably don’t need to worry about it.
I’m probably going to have to do a whole post on the inciting incident thing, but for now I see two possibilities: 1) You’re the sort of writer who needs two or three chapters of “scaffolding” to get into the story. If so, deleting some of them is the unfortunate and painful usual result. Or 2) The thing you call the “inciting incident” isn’t the actual start of the story, and you shouldn’t worry about it.
“…if the true inciting incident shows up 8 chapters in, what do you even do with that?”
I sympathize! I pay a lot of attention to pacing, and like to follow fast-moving scenes with more reflective ones – which means tension can immediately slacken.
The only suggestions I’ve got right now are:
– Hint earlier at the incident. If a main character narrowly avoids a hit-and-run in ch. 8, maybe have them witness a random accident in ch. 2.
– Maybe a little false reassurance early on. “Oh yeah, bud, crime is up for sure. But you won’t have to worry about it.”
– My most successful approach to keeping tension up is in the first draft I just completed last month. I introduced a couple of the antagonists in ch. 1, and immediately established that the viewpoint character couldn’t fight them, flee from the, or hide either. Then I didn’t let up, they just kept dumping on him and his daughter for the whole rest of the novel (until the action climax, haha).
– I guess, to put the above ideas together, establish early some aspect of the tension-causer, even before the inciting incident. Imagery that hints at the problem, or something pertaining to the theme. Overheard disturbing dialog. Something like that?