Fiction Writing

Why We Should All Strive to Become Plantsers

The rigid Pantser/Planner dichotomy blindly adhered to without willingness to incorporate the opposite writing style may do your writing a disservice.

I really should have learned this lesson long ago from my experiences in graduate school. I went to a school that was grounded in the radical behaviorism. The basic formula for this was observe behavior, alter consequences of behavior, change behavior, next patient. The school was one of the bastions of this model to the point that you didn’t mention other models if you knew what was good for you.

Private mental events, meaning, emotions and the like were not part of the equation, nor were the reactions of the psychologist in working with different clients. God forbid did you ever utter the name of Freud, or mention the unconscious or psychoanalysis.

There were those of us who recognized the importance of thoughts and feelings and were more aligned with the cognitive behavioral model (albeit silently). On internship, I was exposed to all kinds of different therapeutic approaches, including the psychodynamic approach and came to realize that each model could contribute to therapy and which you chose depended on the problem and the individual you were working with.

While the model I ascribed most to was the cognitive behavioral model, I developed a toolbox that had techniques from other models that I could use and integrate with my primary approach when appropriate. It also meant if one type of approach wasn’t working that I could switch methods and try other things until discovering what did work.

For those of you who are planners, you likely create your characters and map out your plot before you ever write the first sentence, making sure you have defined all the elements of your story. Pantsers however, may only have rudimentary knowledge about their characters, have determined a couple of major plot points if that, and have a beginning and possibly an ending before jumping in and plunging ahead. They like letting everything unfold as they go.

I admit, I fall into the latter category more often than not. On a few occasions, one in particular which was for NaNoWriMo about 10 years ago, I used a character packet given to us by our liaison and spent two days before nano began developing my protagonist. By the time I was done, I knew everything there was to know about him right down to the color of socks he preferred.

When I began writing, his character just sailed. The majority of details I had defined about him beforehand weren’t included anywhere in the novel. But I knew him. I knew his strengths and weaknesses, his personality, what he liked and hated, the relationship with his family (none of whom appear anywhere in the story), how he handled problems and obstacles and his psychological profile. Since he was also my POV character, he was the primary one who determined which direction the plot would go.

Besides this character, I had the beginning and the end decided, as well as who the other characters were along with a major plot twist. I had no plot points determined.

I can only imagine if I’d mapped out each character or at least the antagonist and main female characters, as well as defined at least some major plot points, how much easier it would have been to write. Yet even with just the one character, I would hit periods of absolute euphoria when writing for three hours each night after work. I’ve never experienced a writing process like that since.

For true, died in the wool, Pantsers, though, the task of putting down details about characters and plot points can be daunting or just not an attractive option. We want to jump right into things and are as excited as the reader, if not more so, to see where the story goes and what happens with our characters. Pantsers love not knowing more than the basics their characters and plot, having fun learning how everything pans out.

For those of you who are true planners, you may attribute this style to laziness but I can assure you it isn’t. It is just as valid a writing process as yours is. For us planning every thing out before hand so that we have the entire story already mapped out, outlined and diagrammed on paper, makes the story no longer interesting, and often we’ll drop it to start something new.

Many of us also find it impossible to outline, and I mean that sincerely. Since grade school, I have never successfully outlined anything. I couldn’t grasp the technique of how you decided what were the main points and what fell under each one. Whenever a teacher assigned an outline, my heart sank because I knew my GPA was about to take a hit. No matter how many people tried to teach me the skill, or how many step-by-step articles or tutorials I did, to this day I have never been able to produce an outline.

Now that I’m involved in creating serials for the new KDP Vella platform, which is for episodic fiction (or non-fiction), I am realizing the value of really getting to know your characters and defining plot points before beginning to write. My first serial was a YA magical fantasy work that I’d previously written as a novella for a contest.

That meant that I’d edited it a number of times and did so again prior to putting it on Vella. So, I knew the characters, and each edit made them deeper and the interactions and relationships more meaningful.

That was the kickoff serial for a series of serials I am working on using the same two main characters. I have found however, that I am having a great deal more difficulty with the second work in the series compared to the first.

I now realize that this is because I didn’t take the time to define any of my characters or plot points. I figured I knew the two main characters well, since I went through an entire adventure with them already.

However, even when using the same characters, especially if they are adolescents, they will change and grow from one story to another even if the second storyline happens immediately after the first on the timeline. So, for the second work I am getting to know all of characters as I go and they are developing before my eyes.

Along with this is the fact that it is episodic and we weren’t told until a couple of weeks ago when the platform would be going live for readers. Since I wanted more than one completed story available before launch, I’ve been finishing a chapter, editing it and then publishing it to the platform instead of completing the entire story, editing it in its entirety and only then publishing the episodes.

This has made the writing harder in terms of keeping things straight, and with changes to the plot, I’ve had to go back and unpublish certain episodes, and edit them to make sure everything was consistent. This has also made the writing much less enjoyable compared to the first one. I had so much fun with the first story, sometimes even cracking myself up and I really liked my characters and felt like they were three dimensional. With the second, I’m not enjoying it much, and days go by where I can’t even work on it.

Kerouac is credited with stream of consciousness writing. He is said to have typed the entire draft of On the Road in three weeks, which would make him the ultimate Pantser. Yet it’s clear from his personal writings that he had been thinking about the story, and developing it along with his writing voice, in his mind and his journals for several years before that famed three-week period in April 1951.

There are numerous road drafts of varying lengths that can be found in Kerouac’s archive at the New York Public Library which include elements that would become part of On the Road. Other ideas went into other novels he wrote. The writing style he developed may have been intended to sound like an uninterrupted flow of ideas written in lengthy bursts of activity until the story was done. But the reality is that he did a great deal of development, both mental and written, before every committing a word to a formal draft.

I think this has been a good experience because it has taught me that no matter what our writing process or style, it’s important to be flexible enough to incorporate at least some aspects of the opposite style when needed. Saying I’m a died in the wool Pantser who doesn’t outline is not being lazy. But it is being rigid in a way that will harm my writing under certain circumstances. Being a pantser doesn’t mean you have to wing everything. When you do, something in your story, be it character development or the plot arch or simply consistency will suffer.

That may not be such a big deal when you are writing a work which you will submit for publication as a whole, meaning you edit the entire things several times with beta readers. You can iron out all the problems after the fact. But when you are trying to submit a serial, in this case hurriedly so it is complete when the platform launches, writing without a game plan can end in disaster or at least a piece of work that isn’t particularly strong.

At this point, my first serial, The Ruby Talisman of Ashmedai, is complete and ready for readers. However, I feel it’s important to make sure the second one is one that I’d also be happy with and so I will be revising the episodes I have written so far to make sure they are high quality and move the work along. While I won’t outline the work, I will at least further develop my characters on paper, figure out the end, and determine what major plot points I need to use to arrive there.

While each of us may lean more or less in one direction or another in terms of our writing style, we have to have a tool box that we can use in different circumstances, with different types of writing and different deadlines or publishing expectations. So perhaps instead of Planners and Pantsers we should consider ourselves PLANtsers or planTSERS. This recognizes our preferred writing style while also acknowledging that successful writing takes a complete toolbox of different techniques.

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You can find a complete list of my articles, stories and poetry on Medium here. Thanks for reading!