The Delicate Dance of Pantsing and Plotting
What you know about craft — intentionally or intuitively — changes how well it works to pants
Recently, I’ve been talking with a lot of authors, published and not yet published, about their processes for writing a new book, and thinking about it in relationship to my own. Especially how it’s changed book over book over book.
What I’ve found is that there is no such thing as fully plotting a book. Something will always come up in actually drafting that you weren’t prepared for. Plans will change. Better ideas will show up.
But I’ve also found that anyone who successfully pantses a story understands craft. Without that, pantsing is just finding out the wrong story so you can narrow down where the right one might appear.
Here is a case study in a decade of writing and eight books.
Writing My First Book
When I started writing my first book, I planned and planned and planned. I followed the Outlining Your Novel book by K.M. Weiland (which I still recommend, especially to new writers). I answered the questions she asked at the end of each chapter. I wrote out as many scene ideas as I could.
Writing that book was hard. I hadn’t developed enough ideas, I hadn’t built enough world, and I didn’t have answers to questions my critique partners asked about the world.
I followed Susan Dennard’s Guide to Revisions for that book, nearly to the letter. I read my draft, wrote questions, separated out my questions by type of question the best I could, put all my scenes on index cards, and revised the best I could.
Revising that book was hard. I didn’t know what I was doing. I left a long, rambling question on a post in that series that never got answered because it didn’t make any sense. But I got to a product with some revisions that I felt good enough about to query (with no success).
Writing My Second Book
The next book I wrote, I pantsed more. I didn’t do the Outlining Your Novel method for planning it. Part of my reasoning was that it hadn’t worked for me, but part of my reason was I had a newborn at home. I had a high concept and a character and a first line, and I did what I could to write that book with less planning.
During National Novel Writing Month in 2014 when I wrote it, I skipped an entire quarter of the book because I didn’t know what to do with it. The whole first draft was less than 50,000 words. I had missing pieces and things I didn’t understand and I threw things at the wall to see what stuck.
That book was even harder to revise. I didn’t know what I wanted to say, or how I wanted to say it. I knew the character, though. I had a voice for him. Some of my favorite early prose is in that book, darlings I wish I could save.
I went through the Guide to Revisions, but I felt like so much of it needed thrown out. I sent desperate emails to my critique partner asking about ideas and how I could get from A to B and what all I needed in the middle for it to qualify as a story. I tore apart the structure, the method of telling it. I got it “done” with even more changes from the original than my first book had, but I wasn’t happy with it.
Pantsing didn’t work for me then.
Book Three — Where I Learned How to Edit
In 2015, I wrote a contemporary for the first time. I knew more about the mood I wanted to create than I knew about the story, and I built it piece by piece. Slowly. It took me two years to finish the first draft, after writing drafts in less than nine months for the books before this.
It was the best first draft I’d written to that point. Hands down. I didn’t underwrite it — my goal of an 80,000-word book was about 80,000 words in every draft. I developed the characters and the prose and the plot together. I was proud of its potential.
Then I tore it to pieces.
I redid everything. I printed out the book character by character to rewrite specific arcs. I tried to redevelop my main character to have a more understandable perspective in an inherently complicated situation. I worked on foreshadowing, motifs, thematic resonance, and layering. Bit by bit for another year and a half, I taught myself what it meant to do a developmental edit. To question everything not because you don’t believe in your draft’s potential but because you do.
For the first time, I reached a finished product feeling like I understood the world inside and out. I could answer my CPs’ questions about elements that didn’t make it onto the page. I was willing to take ‘good’ and throw it out for ‘better.’
My first two books, I queried when I got as far as I could on them without having to question their premises. I answered worldbuilding questions if they mattered on the page, but didn’t dive deeper.
When I finally queried my third book, I knew in the depths of my soul that it was the best book I could have possibly written at the time.
From then on, I decided that had to be my measurement for when something was done. I needed to write the best book I could.
It’s Not a Matter of If to Plan, but What to Plan
Planning plot
My fourth book is the enchantress book I’ve written about a few times. For that book, I meticulously planned the eight main points of the story (using Save the Cat and Larry Brooks), but I more or less pantsed the magic system based on what I knew it needed to line up with Beauty and the Beast. I ran out of time before NaNo, so did the best I could to get my character from A to B to C.
I finished the book, including writing 50,000 words in November — and “winning” NaNo for the first time — but it wasn’t good enough. (Notice a theme here about rough drafts?)
I knew it wasn’t good enough. And, more importantly, I knew I wasn’t a good enough writer to fix it. Not yet. I could see the holes, but not how to fill them. So I set it aside.
When I went back to it in 2021, I ended up completely revamping how magic works, what its cost is, and whether it’s genetic in addition to taking a bad guy and making him good, removing a scene with assault that felt cheap, and making the (honestly accidentally) implied romance explicitly on the page.
But the plot didn’t change at all. Not the major beats. Those I knew from the beginning. My goal with revision was to ensure the plot worked with the characters and the worldbuilding, and I knew it was the latter two I needed to change.
I plotted, but I also pantsed the world, and had to come back to it later to make it work.
It took years, but it worked for me. I could piecemeal a world that allowed the plot to work how I wanted it to, and now I’m nearly to a finished draft, ready for the world.
Planning character
In 2018, I left fantasy for another contemporary story. I stopped using the Guide to Revisions because by this book — my fifth — I felt more confident in what I needed to do as I revised, and what was missing. I saw more holes. But I also saw more ways to fix them.
This time around, I knew the characters well and I liked the world. The plot was less stable when I wrote it. When I went to revise, it became clear the plot wasn’t working as written. I gutted twenty-five percent of the book entirely and rewrote it with a different plot. But the personalities, relationships, and backstories didn’t change.
I understood the characters and voices, as I had with my second book, but this time I realized that meant I needed to revise until it worked. And it did. It was my best-received book to date, with more than fifteen full requests and feedback of ‘this is not for me, but it’s definitely for someone.’
The Joy of Discovery
These days, I feel like if I know what story I want to tell, I can pants characters who need that story, and make it all jibe in revisions. Conversely, if I know characters well, I can trust their decisions and pants the story. But anyone who’s talked about pantsing working for them has known something in depth.
Take the recent New York Times bestselling YA novel, The Luminaries by Susan Dennard (the creator of the fabulous guide to revisions I used almost a decade ago; link is to a paid-subscriber-only Substack post I highly recommend). She’s talked in many places how that world was a decade old by the time she finally sold the story. She knew how it worked. She knew the characters, even as she tweaked them. In 2019, she ran a poll-driven version of that story on Twitter that resulted in a publishing contract for the world.
And she pantsed a brand new story for it, that didn’t even need major overhauls. Because she knew three things:
- the world
- the characters
- writing craft
I’m getting to the point where I can trust myself in a similar way. When I started writing this year’s book, I knew it would be a loose retelling of Much Ado about Nothing, so I had my scaffolding upon which to hang my plot. I set it in Portland, where I live. I knew
- the plot
- the worldbuliding
- writing craft
Then I let the characters come alive on the page for me. I knew where I needed to get to, and the characters have shown me how to get there. I’m sure I’ll have revisions to do. It’s part of the process. But I can pants the story a little more because I know I can look at my word count, see that I’m creeping up on 40,000 words, and know, because I know story craft, that I need to be setting up the pieces for the midpoint. And I know what the midpoint is because I have the scaffolding of the plot.
What Does This Mean for You?
I truly believe no one figures out how to write a book. They figure out how to write this book. If you’re writing a fantasy, maybe you could pants a story— after you know a ton about the world and the characters. Conversely, if you figure out the plot and theme first, you could figure out what character is best suited to it as you go, and what the world needs to be like in order for the plot to feel organic.
In my experience, you can ‘pants’ a story, but never with, ‘I don’t know anyone, I don’t know this world, I have no idea what the plot should be, and I don’t know writing craft.’ For a successful experience in discovery writing, you need to know at least one of the first three, and quite a bit of the last.
The best authors who don’t outline are the ones who studied plot — formally or informally — for years first. Eleven years ago, Susan Dennard shared a methodical revision process she used as she learned about story structure. Now she needs to discover as she writes — because she knows how to plot. Stephen King has insisted he doesn’t plan his stories, but he knows craft like almost no one else.
Discovery writing is all about trusting your instincts. But you can’t trust instincts you haven’t developed.
