Hey hi,
So we’ve looked at the parts of my process I’m happy with—tools and organization—but what about the stuff I want to improve?
When I began working on my current WIP (work in progress), I wanted to examine my habit of plotting vs. pantsing. For those that don’t know, plotting is outlining the entire story before writing; pantsing is “flying by the seat of one’s pants” and making things up as you write. I plotted Darling Rose Gold (DRG) and This Might Hurt (TMH) before writing because in real life I’m a planner and extremely organized, and the idea of winging a 90k-100k-word book seemed the stuff of nightmares. I assumed I’d take many, many wrong turns as a pantser, which would mean endless drafts and time wasted while I tried to figure out the right path. Not to mention I wasn’t sure how writers were pants-ing thrillers, considering how many twists and turns are involved.
That said, when I stepped back to consider how plotting ahead of time worked for me with DRG and TMH, I realized the process was perhaps not as efficient as I thought. I have now completed three novels. With every single one, the plot changed almost entirely between drafts 1 and 2. I’m talking throwing out 60k-70k words each time. DRG didn’t take me that many drafts to get the story right, but as you saw from my last post, TMH took two years and seven drafts before everything fell into place. Could pants-ing possibly have slowed my progress more than that?
This understanding, plus a few writer friends, is what encouraged me to try pantsing. When I admitted to myself that my current process was offering me nothing more than a security blanket—confronting the blank page is a lot less daunting when you have your whole book mapped out!—I felt like I didn’t have all that much to lose.
Below are the three main drawbacks of plotting before draft 1 for me:
#1: I don’t know the characters well enough yet.
I’ve chosen a handful of people, named them, and given them skimpy backgrounds, but at this point they’re my acquaintances, not my family members. By the time I finish the first draft, I often realize Character X would never do Action Y, and Action Y is sometimes something the entire plot hinges on.
#2: I often forget about cause and effect.
This is the biggest drawback for me. When I’m brainstorming with a bunch of blank index cards in front of me, I’ll think, Wouldn’t it be cool if Mary killed someone with the blade of her ice skate? I’ll also think, Wouldn’t it be cool if George had a dark history with the circus? And I’ll probably think, I’ve always wanted to write about loners. Why don’t I have the story start with an unnamed character living in the woods? I do this fifty times until I have a bunch of filled-in notecards that in no way tie together. (I’m exaggerating but only slightly.) Whatever happens in Chapter 1 has to cause what happens in Chapter 2. Or the next chapter in that timeline, but you know what I mean. I am exceedingly bad at remembering this.
#3: It delays the actual writing.
There is a period of time at the very beginning of a new project that is utter magic. The closest comparison I can make is falling in love. It’s all promise, you’re infatuated, you can’t stop thinking about it, you have the energy of a THOUSAND SIX-YEAR-OLDS ready to be channeled into this one sparkly idea. As the idea sits with you, it slooooooooowly loses its sparkle. Partly because once you commit something to paper, you see all the flaws that you couldn’t see in your head. But also because our brains like shiny new things. Our brains are less psyched about long and sustained focus. I used to force myself to finish all my research and plotting before I’d write anything, except maybe the first chapter. By the time I started writing, I’d still be excited, but not as much as I was two or three months prior. Writing can be a grind, so I think it’s worth channeling that six-year-old energy toward drafting while you’ve got it. Research can wait. Plotting can wait.
Okay, so how am I approaching my current WIP?
The more I talked to self-described pantsers, the more I realized they don’t mean they sit down at their computers every day with literally no idea what they’re going to write. Usually they mean they write without an outline, that they’re guided more by instinct than a plan.
The idea for my WIP has always revolved around a certain BIG THING happening 40-50% of the way through the novel. I didn’t know how I was going to get there or what would happen afterward, but I knew this BIG THING would go down and turn the entire book on its head. I’ve used that BIG THING as my north star. How do we get from where these characters are on page 1 to where they’ll be at the halfway point? What’s the first thing that goes wrong? What’s the fallout of that misstep? What’s the fallout of the fallout? And so on. Cause and effect!
I still have my Scrivener corkboard (see Part 1: Tools), but it’s much more filled in for the first half of the book. I create cards as I go, more as a tracking tool instead of a forecasting tool. (e.g. I need to make edits to the scene where Rose Gold finds out who her father is… oh right, that was in Chapter 8.) Perhaps it’s more accurate to say I’m still forecasting, just not as far out. As of this writing, I’m drafting Chapter 16. I know what will happen through Chapter 20—that’s where the BIG THING happens. Beyond that, I have a handful of cards that suggest incredibly vague things like “We learn Zoe’s secret.”
Basically what I’m saying is I’m plotting as I go. I’m researching as I go. Because I don’t have every chapter and scene bullet-pointed out, this sometimes means the writing day takes longer. I am physically writing slower because I sometimes don’t know what’s going to happen next. Writing slowly has a psychological effect for me. The slower I write, the more aware I am of the labor. I have long equated writing slowly with writing poorly… which is patently untrue. But I like my writing experience to feel like my reading experience: steady, speedy, effortless. Some part of me thinks the starts and stops of my brain will show up on the page, that the prose won’t flow as well for the reader. I have no idea whether any of this is true, but it remains my biggest hang-up with pantsing.
I can’t say whether pantsing will produce better results (i.e. fewer drafts) than plotting for me. Any good science experiment requires changing one variable at a time, and alas, I have not done that here; I’ve changed multiple elements. (More on that to come in Part 4, my schedule.) Once the novel is done, I’ll be curious to look back and compare the processes. Until then, the experimentation continues!
What else do you want to discuss about the writing process? Reply to this email or leave a comment.
Thanks for reading,
my writing process (part 3)
Excellent article. At what point do you and your agent or editor discuss the marketability of the proposed book? The book concept needs to have appeal to an audience. Is this vetted early on or during the draft process? No matter how well written, a book concept with a narrow audience appeal, I suppose, will never see it's way onto bookstore shelves.