I might get piled on for this one, but here goes:
There is no such thing as pantsing.
I bring this up now, because we’re about to move deeper into my I Have an Idea for a Novel. Now What??? series, aimed at getting you through that first draft of your novel. And my method of getting you through that draft relies heavily on plotting. In the first place, plotting is something concrete that’s teachable (where pantsing largely is not), and in the second place…
Like I said, I just don’t think there’s truly such a thing as pure pantsing.
If you’ve never run into this distinction before, it’s pretty simple:
Most authors say that when they draft, they are either plotters (they subscribe to the idea that it’s best to outline a book before attempting to write a single line) or pantsers (they subscribe to the idea that it’s best to just sit down and let ‘er rip, flying by the seats of their pants as they get that first draft down).
Now, before you light your torches, I am not saying that pantsing is somehow inferior to plotting.
Pantsing definitely has some advantages. There is no pure brainstorming method that competes with the way we interact with language. When you are writing an actual scene with actual paragraphs and are working on turns of phrases…
Things just…happen. Magical things. We see characters in new ways. We see what should physically take place. We understand our own fictional world in a brand-new way.
What I am saying is that I always personally found first drafts to be fairly painful.
I hated them. I claimed to be a plotter, but what I was basically doing was writing (in outline form) a pretty vague notion of what my book would be about. In these outlines, I focused only on events, not on theme or character arcs. And then, inevitably, when I sat down to draft, I would have to fill in those thematic and character development blanks as I went, which would mess up my outline, and less than halfway in, my outline was completely toast and then I was doing the whole fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants thing.
And then, as I approached the end, my first draft was in just awful shape. Say around 75% or so, I would know that I needed to toss at least half. But then I would wonder what the best (least time-consuming) solution would be: write through to the end, knowing that the middle was messed up, just to get it down? Or start in at the beginning, because the middle, once fixed, would impact what should happen at the end? Or was it best to at least figure out how I think it should end now, because that would impact how the book should be set up…?
Right.
So I dug in deep and learned to plot in a way that incorporated theme and character arc(s) as well.
But Holly, you’re saying, just because this works for you doesn’t mean it will work for everyone. You’re not saying pantsers should become something they’re not…?
Nope. What I’m saying is, we all wind up having to plot. We just do it at two different ends of the first-draft process:
Plotters, of course, plot first. Pantsers draft first. And then…
Well, they have to figure out how to rework their manuscript. That often includes a brainstorming process. (That’s certainly what I always had to do after the first draft.) My own brainstorming process reimagined the events and characters. I came up with new scenes that showed theme. Or tightened the plot…
Which is exactly what a plotter does.
So my point is, pantsers plot too. Just after the first draft, not before.
My own first draft process? These days, it’s probably what most people would call a panster-plotter hybrid. I combine plotting / outlining with writing scenes. Preferably the most important scenes of the book. The meet-cute in a romance, the death scene in a mystery. I write the plot points. I mean actually dramatize them. Then I take what I learned back to the outline and tweak the outline. I do a bit of back and forth, and then I head into drafting the whole book.
The beauty is, I have both a solid outline and a handful of finished scenes. So it doesn’t feel all totally-blank-page horrible.
So that’ll be where I’m coming from as I begin to show you how to outline your own first draft. We’ll start with your main character’s backstory, next week in the I Have an Idea for a Novel. Now What??? series.