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.
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