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Pantser-turned-plotter going back to pantsing...

9K views 149 replies 49 participants last post by  dgcasey 
#1 ·
I've learned, through listening/watching interviews, that most of (if not all) of my favorite authors eschew outlining for various reasons, including that kills creativity and inspiration. I tend to agree. I used to enjoy pantsing myself, but became convinced to become a plotter when the self-publishing revolution took hold as it sounded reasonable that outlining would allow me to pump out more stories in a shorter period of time, however...


I cannot do it anymore. It's making my writing formulaic and it's turned my writing time each day into a boring grind. I find outlining to be a huge creative buzzkill that often stops me dead in my tracks. Besides I often find I come up with my most creative ideas and interesting storylines when I'm pantsing anyway. This may prove to be something that slows my output, but I'm going back to pantsing and dropping planning/plotting from my writing process altogether. Even the thought of doing so has me feeling excited.


How about you? Are you a former pantser who now plots for every project? Or perhaps it's just the opposite for you? I'd be interested to hear your experiences with outlining, or not outlining, as it were. Have you shifted from one method to the other? How has it worked/not worked for you?
 
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#2 ·
I had to laugh when I read your topic - that's me! The last book I wrote, I pantsed it completely. You know what? I can't remember the last time I enjoyed writing so much! I even found myself happier throughout the days.

That said, I'm trying to find a happy medium between pantsing and plotting. Plotting definitely allows for less time in the rewriting and editing stages. Plotting is important, but not to the point where I lose my love of writing.
 
#3 ·
*high five*

I'm TOTALLY a pantser-turned plotter-turned pantser.  I started off pantsing.  I had to pick up plotting for various and sundry reasons and, yes, it did get books out a whole heck of a lot quicker.  That said... The books I've plotted are my worst sellers.  It appears my creative spark that causes readers to get excited about my words only shows up if everything is as big a surprise to me as it is to them.  And I'm totally cool with that.  I'm very grateful to know this tool is in my back pocket if I need it, but I am quite happy to return back to the formula which worked.
 
#4 ·
Guilty!  Though perhaps I was never a full-fledged plotter for that time, it's only recently that I've allowed myself to go back to the realm of total pantsing.  It's much more comfortable that way too.

When I'm surprised, crying, laughing or angry over what I've written, that means the reader will be as well (hopefully).  If I'm robotic or bored with my words, I'm probably putting the reader to sleep too.  Life's full of surprises - so that means books should be too.

So pants away, I'll always say!
 
#5 ·
I taught myself to write as a pantser, but everyone was always saying how much better plotting was, how it made the books easier and quicker to write, so I tried my darnedest to become a plotter. It killed every bit of joy in writing for me. Now I'm back to writing into the dark (though I do have some idea about how the story is going, things can and do change) and so much happier.

The thing is, neither way is right or wrong. All that matters is to find what works for us, and then do that.
 
#7 ·
I tried outlining. Really, I tried. It went something like this...

First chapter, characters will do X. Action is Y. Climax and resolution is Z.

Ok great. This is me starting to write the chapter...

Ok MC, you need to do X and then... what? Didn't you hear what I said? You are supposed to do X. I don't care if that goes against your culture and your identity. I said you do X, so you do... OK, you know what... you just do whatever. Don't mind me slaving away fixing the trouble you just stirred. I have to rewrite the entire rest of the chapter and add a new one just because you couldn't do X! I don't care if it's better this way... well, ok, maybe I do but that's not the point! I AM THE AUTHOR. YOU ARE THE CHARACTER! YOU WILL DO WHAT I SAY?! What? Do what I write? Are you trying to get cheeky with me? You best be careful, I might write you into a terrible ending. What's that? Bring it on you said?!! You think you are smarter than me? Why you... wait... what are you doing now? No. NO! Stop that right now! That area isn't even on my crudely drawn Paint map! Get back here! Ooooo what's that over there? Ok let's go check it out...

So as you can see, the characters own my butt and do whatever the heck they want to do once I create them and unleash them into the story. I have no friggen clue what they are going to do and any attempts to rein them in just results in them doing the complete opposite. Clearly I suck at figuring out my characters' head space ahead of time during the outlining process because they totally come up with far better plans than I do in the heat of the moment.
 
#8 ·
C. Gold said:
I tried outlining. Really, I tried. It went something like this...

First chapter, characters will do X. Action is Y. Climax and resolution is Z.

Ok great. This is me starting to write the chapter...

Ok MC, you need to do X and then... what? Didn't you hear what I said? You are supposed to do X. I don't care if that goes against your culture and your identity. I said you do X, so you do... OK, you know what... you just do whatever. Don't mind me slaving away fixing the trouble you just stirred. I have to rewrite the entire rest of the chapter and add a new one just because you couldn't do X! I don't care if it's better this way... well, ok, maybe I do but that's not the point! I AM THE AUTHOR. YOU ARE THE CHARACTER! YOU WILL DO WHAT I SAY?! What? Do what I write? Are you trying to get cheeky with me? You best be careful, I might write you into a terrible ending. What's that? Bring it on you said?!! You think you are smarter than me? Why you... wait... what are you doing now? No. NO! Stop that right now! That area isn't even on my crudely drawn Paint map! Get back here! Ooooo what's that over there? Ok let's go check it out...

So as you can see, the characters own my butt and do whatever the heck they want to do once I create them and unleash them into the story. I have no friggen clue what they are going to do and any attempts to rein them in just results in them doing the complete opposite. Clearly I suck at figuring out my characters' head space ahead of time during the outlining process because they totally come up with far better plans than I do in the heat of the moment.
LOL ROTFL!!! ;D. I can so totally relate. I swear to God my characters are not in fact fictional. I think they're paranormal beings haunting my head.

Yes OP, welcome back to the dark side!!! Next you gotta learn to write to your muse instead of writing to the market, and then you'll reach Level 3 of the Mutant Writers Continuum.
 
#10 ·
Yay, I finally feel like I'm actually ahead of the curve for once!! I've never plotted, a pantser all the way. Closest I come to 'plotting' is having a couple (two or three or maybe four) particular scenes I want to include, and I literally write my way from one of these "must-have scenes" to the next. I've written books based around one scene I wanted. Heck, once I wrote a book because I wanted to use a particular title.
 
#11 ·
jaehaerys said:
I've learned, through listening/watching interviews, that most of (if not all) of my favorite authors eschew outlining for various reasons, including that kills creativity and inspiration. I tend to agree. I used to enjoy pantsing myself, but became convinced to become a plotter when the self-publishing revolution took hold as it sounded reasonable that outlining would allow me to pump out more stories in a shorter period of time, however...

I cannot do it anymore. It's making my writing formulaic and it's turned my writing time each day into a boring grind. I find outlining to be a huge creative buzzkill that often stops me dead in my tracks. Besides I often find I come up with my most creative ideas and interesting storylines when I'm pantsing anyway. This may prove to be something that slows my output, but I'm going back to pantsing and dropping planning/plotting from my writing process altogether. Even the thought of doing so has me feeling excited.

How about you? Are you a former pantser who now plots for every project? Or perhaps it's just the opposite for you? I'd be interested to hear your experiences with outlining, or not outlining, as it were. Have you shifted from one method to the other? How has it worked/not worked for you?
For me, it's been the opposite. I started out just free writing and was always getting stuck and my writing progress was minimal. As soon as I started plotting out my story and then my chapters the creativity levels shot through the roof! I knew so much about where I wanted to go that thigns got much easier and words flowed onto the page. I can't see any case of it having stifling effects.

How could making a plan stifle you? There is no law that you have to follow the plan if it's not the best path for your story. It just gives you a road to follow and you can divert and create new paths whenever it's in your stories best interest.
 
#12 ·
Yeah, I learned long ago that if I tried to make too firm of an outline or plan, not letting my characters decide what would happen, they'd refuse to play.  And...I find myself re-learning that from time to time, as I get too strong of a notion what should happen in a story, instead of following an organic route.
 
#13 ·
Herefortheride said:
For me, it's been the opposite. I started out just free writing and was always getting stuck and my writing progress was minimal. As soon as I started plotting out my story and then my chapters the creativity levels shot through the roof! I knew so much about where I wanted to go that thigns got much easier and words flowed onto the page. I can't see any case of it having stifling effects.

How could making a plan stifle you? There is no law that you have to follow the plan if it's not the best path for your story. It just gives you a road to follow and you can divert and create new paths whenever it's in your stories best interest.
I think for some of us, creating a plan takes time away from writing the story and hinders rather than helps. I also tend to feel less interested in writing the story if it is too detailed because then I know how it goes and writing the words is just busy work.

I pretty much have a beginning and an end and everything else is fuzzy generalities and up for grabs. Trying to nail anything down, even a chapter ahead, results in wasted effort because my characters do their own thing. Perhaps I should do a write up of how my outline got butchered again and again by my characters as I wrote my first novel. Quite hilarious, really.
 
#14 ·
C. Gold said:
Why you... wait... what are you doing now? No. NO! Stop that right now! That area isn't even on my crudely drawn Paint map! Get back here! Ooooo what's that over there? Ok let's go check it out...
{Snipped for brevity, but boy oh boy, this is a lovely summary!}

Yeah, this is me too. There is nothing to beat that frisson of excitement when you realise just what's going to happen... and it's awesome! And also that moment when the casual throwaway comment in chapter 2, which you didn't even understand yourself, becomes the crux of the whole book. It's lovely when it just works.

I do have a sort-of outline thingy going on, where I keep bullet points of events that might well happen. But it's kind of fluid, and sometimes, as you say, the characters veer off-message and just take over, and that's just so much fun. I remember the first time my characters just picked up a scene and ran off with it, and I was just: wait, what happened there? Until I realised it was way better than anything my conscious mind could have come up with. Sometimes the subconscious knows best.

This is not to say that pantsing works for everyone, because it doesn't. Some people work best with a 60-page outline, and some need a basic structure and some just wing it, and as long as a finished book comes out at the end, it really doesn't matter.
 
#15 ·
Herefortheride said:
For me, it's been the opposite. I started out just free writing and was always getting stuck and my writing progress was minimal. As soon as I started plotting out my story and then my chapters the creativity levels shot through the roof! I knew so much about where I wanted to go that thigns got much easier and words flowed onto the page. I can't see any case of it having stifling effects.

How could making a plan stifle you? There is no law that you have to follow the plan if it's not the best path for your story. It just gives you a road to follow and you can divert and create new paths whenever it's in your stories best interest.
With the usual "everyone is different" caveat, when I plan, I find the writing I'm doing in an attempt to follow that plan is deeply uninspired. I have ruined the part that makes writing the most fun, for me: the discovery of the unknown. It's terrifying, not knowing how a story is going to go, but it's the only way I can do it. I have never in my life finished something that started as an outline, because I get bored. I'm including screenwriting, when an outline is generally important.
 
#16 ·
C. Gold said:
I think for some of us, creating a plan takes time away from writing the story and hinders rather than helps. I also tend to feel less interested in writing the story if it is too detailed because then I know how it goes and writing the words is just busy work.

I pretty much have a beginning and an end and everything else is fuzzy generalities and up for grabs. Trying to nail anything down, even a chapter ahead, results in wasted effort because my characters do their own thing. Perhaps I should do a write up of how my outline got butchered again and again by my characters as I wrote my first novel. Quite hilarious, really.
It's the same for us planners as well. We have no idea how the story will go. An outline just gives you a potential path to go down and takes very little time to create. I fail to see how drawing up a potential plan can stifle you.
 
#17 ·
Herefortheride said:
I fail to see how drawing up a potential plan can stifle you.
I think this is one of those situations where you just have to accept that, for a lot of pantsers, a plan *does* stifle some element of creativity. For instance:

C. Gold said:
I also tend to feel less interested in writing the story if it is too detailed because then I know how it goes and writing the words is just busy work.
 
#18 ·
Edward M. Grant said:
I suspect we're talking about different things here. To me, outlining means spending days to weeks developing the story and characters so I know exactly what happens in the entire book from beginning to end (in some cases I even wrote it as a movie script, and then converted that to a novel). Pantsing means I have a vague idea of the characters and where the story is likely to go, then start writing. So I'd class you as a pantser, not a plotter.
Well no, as I said, it's more like showing myself how one potential path might look. If it looks good I can start filling it with all kinds of interesting things. I just tend to always hear about this thing called "Writer's block" often from people who don't like outlines. I've never suffered from writer's block. When I sit down to write I have a plan and as the words hit paper the characters come to life and fill in the story. I would find free-writing to be incredibly stifling because everything is off the top of the head. Depth is much harder to achieve that way. IMO.
 
#19 ·
Chiming in to agree on the virtue of pantsing! I think I've sort of been assuming that eventually I'll "evolve into a plotter," but for now, every time I do detailed outlining, it kills the joy of any further writing. It's like I've already written it! Why write it again? There's nothing like that joy of discovery as you write. Nice to see my feelings on this point validated.

FWIW, I also find that the desire to discover is what drives me to write quickly when I do. I've had one 10k word day, almost all pantsing. It can be done!
 
#20 ·
Herefortheride said:
It's the same for us planners as well. We have no idea how the story will go. An outline just gives you a potential path to go down and takes very little time to create. I fail to see how drawing up a potential plan can stifle you.
I think a bona fide "outline" would describe exactly how the story will go. Jotting down a few ideas of what you want to have happen isn't quite the same as plotting.
 
#21 ·
Herefortheride said:
Well no, as I said, it's more like showing myself how one potential path might look. If it looks good I can start filling it with all kinds of interesting things. I just tend to always hear about this thing called "Writer's block" often from people who don't like outlines. I've never suffered from writer's block. When I sit down to write I have a plan and as the words hit paper the characters come to life and fill in the story. I would find free-writing to be incredibly stifling because everything is off the top of the head. Depth is much harder to achieve that way. IMO.
I've had writer's block. It happened when I outlined.

As we've said, everyone's different.
 
#22 ·
I feel like my experience talking and reading discussions with other authors is the exact opposite-a large majority greatly seem to prefer pantsing and very few outline.

Personally, I have to outline. And it's not a chore for me either, I greatly enjoy the process and I feel like it makes my writing stronger and way more engaging. The few times I've attempted to start a novel (or even a short story) without an outline have always ended in disaster. Things wind up feeling vague and half baked, and I'm left frustrated and overwhelmed because I have no clue what's going on. My outline prevents that, and I've never felt 'trapped' or 'boxed in' by an outline either.

To be honest, I feel like I do what many pantsers do, but simply in the outlining stage. By the time I'm working on my outline, I know my characters very well. If something feels weird or off because it's OOC for them, I sense it in the outline and I stop and reexamine what happened. it can take me a couple weeks to work on my outline and I like it to be fairly detailed, and during that process things become more and more fleshed out which once again helps me see my characters more clearly. Also, just because I stick to my outline very closely, doesn't mean I don't still sometimes stumble upon surprises. Conversations and minor actions happen naturally and I'll make a note to expand on those subplots and ideas later when editing.
 
#23 ·
Amen!  :-*

I've tried time and again to plot and I just can't! I lose interest in a story when I plot it, then have to start over. So I gave up plotting. I still follow story structure but I let the story unfold as it goes. It's much funner that way, doesn't feel like work, and it feels true to my process. Outlining does not work for me.
 
#24 ·
RRodriguez said:
I feel like my experience talking and reading discussions with other authors is the exact opposite-a large majority greatly seem to prefer pantsing and very few outline.

Personally, I have to outline. And it's not a chore for me either, I greatly enjoy the process and I feel like it makes my writing stronger and way more engaging. The few times I've attempted to start a novel (or even a short story) without an outline have always ended in disaster. Things wind up feeling vague and half baked, and I'm left frustrated and overwhelmed because I have no clue what's going on. My outline prevents that, and I've never felt 'trapped' or 'boxed in' by an outline either.
Exactly. How is thinking about your story going to hurt creativity? The more you consider your plot, characters, setting, etc the better your story will be. If shocks me to hear writers "get bored" thinking about their story. How could you get bored considering the path of your story? The better you know your characters the more they can tell you. And again, it's not like you have to go the path of your outline. It's just more ammunition for you to use or consider. A lot of my plotting taks place when I'm sitting on the subway, in an elevator, walking somewhere, or on a treadmill. It's nice to spend that otherwise wasted time considering my work.

Writers should love their stories.
 
#25 ·
I am a pantser, and I've always been a pantser.  :D

I just love that feeling as I'm writing when all of the sudden everything just falls into place, and something that was a small unimportant addition earlier in the story then becomes something bigger later in the story. It's magical!

Unfortunately, I've been considering plotting a little. But not traditional/more rigid plotting. This would mainly be to scratch the itch of other ideas while I'm trying to finish the current project. I have this humorous fantasy series that I want to flesh out and I was thinking of it more along the lines of pantsing a synopsis instead of plotting - lol. Or at least jot down the ideas I currently have. And then I was also thinking of trying to just pants out a super skeletal draft of the 3rd novel in my Trinity Torn series.

So maybe even my thoughts of plotting a little are more still pantsing - lmao. I can't seem to make myself plot!  :eek:
 
#26 ·
Herefortheride said:
Exactly. How is thinking about your story going to hurt creativity? The more you consider your plot, characters, setting, etc the better your story will be. If shocks me to hear writers "get bored" thinking about their story. How could you get bored considering the path of your story? The better you know your characters the more they can tell you. And again, it's not like you have to go the path of your outline. It's just more ammunition for you to use or consider. A lot of my plotting taks place when I'm sitting on the subway, in an elevator, walking somewhere, or on a treadmill. It's nice to spend that otherwise wasted time considering my work.

Writers should love their stories.
You're working really, really hard to make this antagonistic.

Look, you do what works and I'll do what works and everybody will be fine. An "if you don't like outlining you're wrong" perspective is utterly useless.
 
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