Pantsing

Pantsing refers to a style of writing whereas one makes the story up as they go along. It’s part of the trinity of methods, the other two of which are planning and plantsing. Planning the story is just what it sounds like — from using an outline of each chapter to setting up scenes and documented world-building. Plantsing is somewhere between the chaos of making it up spontaneously and organizing everything.

Normally I am a plantser — I have “note cards” (a feature on Scrivener, the program I recommend for writing novels) for each chapter denoting what should happen in the chapter, and I see where those directions and the characters take me. But this time around, I have diverged from the note cards enough that I am most definitely pantsing.

For example, I was writing about how my characters in their collective (think commune, sort of) were going to cope with the potential for communications and shipping breakdown in the oncoming breakdown of American society, and I thought about replacement parts and fuel for the farm. While I was in the middle of writing that, I thought, “Oh my god, what are they going to do about the staple goods they don’t grow themselves?” The collective eats a certain amount of bread, for example, but they don’t raise the wheat themselves because only the wrong type of wheat grows in the Midwest. In addition, they’re vegetarian and bought rather than grew their legumes. They use their farm land for more suitable items for the collective, like fresh fruits and vegetables, as they could always buy the staples through the local food co-op. So they suddenly figured out they could have a food crisis. In striving to be self-sufficient, they blinded themselves to the fact that they were not self-sufficient, any more than other humans. They discovered this at the same point where I thought about it, of course.

I may edit this later, putting the food crisis before the capital goods crisis chronologically. But I may not, because if it occurred to me in that order, maybe it would have occurred to them in that order. Maybe the capital goods crisis they envisioned was the one the collective saw most clearly^* and therefore first. Part of the process of pantsing is the harder job of editing down the line.

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It’s been a wild ride writing this novel so far. I feel like I’m climbing a rock wall without a belayer. If I felt a lot better about my rock climbing skills, I would not feel like I needed belaying.^** Ah, well. See you at the edit.

^* This is known in cognitive psychology as the availability heuristic, whereas we believe the most readily imagined scenario is the most likely or important one. This heuristic is why young people buy life insurance and not disability insurance despite being 7 times more likely to die than to become disabled.

^**I just about used the word ‘balayage’ here, which is a hair-dyeing technique. Oops.

Twelve Years of Writing

I’ve been writing for twelve years. I started, strangely, three months after being diagnosed with bipolar 2, which I hadn’t realized till today. I know I didn’t start writing as a coping mechanism or as character insertion (my first characters were not me) and I didn’t write about being bipolar. I think I started writing because being treated for bipolar helped me focus on continuous tasks instead of pouring all my energy on the whim of the moment.

I was not a good writer at first — I wrote each chapter as if they were separate episodes, like short stories strung together. I didn’t feel like I wrote an overarching plot. The novels (I use the term loosely) I wrote then I have had to revise several times such that only the characters are the same. I learned a lot from revising them.

Things I have learned over the past few years:

My first draft is not my novel. Over the years, the novels have needed less and less rewriting, but there are always things to fix in second and third (and fourth, and …) drafts.
Developmental editors are an important part of your writing toolbox. It is worth paying for them.
There are three ways to write a novel: Plotting, pantsing, and plantsing.
- Plotting: an organized outline at the beginning, and following the outline.
- Pantsing: writing it as one goes along, without the outline.
- Plantsing: writing with a rough outline but pantsing through the chapters.
- I am a plantser.
Scrivener is a great program for composing my work, especially plantsing.
- Scrivener arranges itself around a chapter format and a synopsis form that I use to guide my chapters. I use it like pantsing with training wheels.
- One can get templates for Scrivener novel-writing that incorporate plotting frameworks, such as Save the Cat and Romancing the Plot.
ProWritingAid was another investment I don’t regret — my grammar has improved in ways I hadn’t considered before. I have lessened my passive verb structure massively.
Writing is the easy and fun part. I still don’t think I have the hang of promotion (and this blog is part of my proof of that.)
My favorite novel is always the one I just finished.

The most important thing I learned? That I can write. The second? That there’s a whole lot of luck in being discovered, and luck hasn’t come to me quite yet.

I feel like I could have learned more in 12 years, and maybe I have, but these are the biggest things I can think of. I hope they’re helpful to someone!

I’m plotting!

I’m doing more plotting on November’s Kringle book (now tentatively called Kringle on Fire) than I have done on any book up till now. This is evidence that it hasn’t truly grabbed me yet, so it concerns me. The process is usually easier than this, with my characters and plots developing organically during discussions with my husband.

There are benefits to plotting a book, especially if one uses a framework like Save the Cat! or Romancing the Beat. You can find information on these online. One can also find derivatives of Save the Cat! and Romancing the Beat as Scrivener templates. The templates have significant advantages for writers and readers. Writers use someone else’s research to develop the story in a way that makes sense and the structure takes away a big concern when editing. Future readers can find the peaks and troughs of the plot where they expect.

Because I want to write this book for NaNoWriMo this November, and be part of a worldwide group of writers, I’m going to have to write however I can. That, in this case, means plotting.

Day 1 Summary NaNoWriMo: Time for Pantsing

I wrote my first 2000 words yesterday, flying my way through the first chapter. The good news is that the writing was easy. The bad news is that, if i go through my outline at this rate, I will be done in 16,000 words, which is 34,000 words short of a win.

It might be time to start pantsing.

To explain (and review for my longer-time readers), there are three modes of writing:

Planning, which means writing with a meticulous outline;
Pantsing, which means flying by the seat of your pants;
Plantsing, which is somewhere in-between.

I think I’ve said in these pages before that I’m a plantser, which for me means having an outline with enough leeway to fill in the blanks. But it’s not working this time — perhaps I didn’t put in enough of an outline, or I wasn’t as sure about the action. So I will be pantsing a bit.

What encourages me is that the more I write, the more the layers of the characters reveal themselves to me. These characters need to be complex, because the story will demand that my characters grow and develop — and become the spirit of Christmas.

Day 3 Nano — Plantsing Away (with story segment)

I think I remember telling people I’m a Plantser in NaNo parlance — I plan, but only so far, using a set of scene synopses instead of a full outline. This is easy to do in Scrivener, which uses a notecard schema for chapter and scene synopses.

When writing, even at 2000 words a day, I’m restructuring my outline by adding and moving those scenario cards. Yesterday, I realized that NOTHING plotwise was happening between visiting The Jungle, a geographical entity which includes Chicago and Detroit, and Salt Lake City. That’s hundreds of miles, folks. 1400 miles to be exact. I’m sure I could skip over that segment of flyover country, but given that one of the themes of the story is self-discovery (“It’s ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ meets ‘North by Northwest!’) I easily could give my protagonist a few pertinent experiences there. I’ve added a chapter — actually, two half-chapters — to facilitate some adventures here.

I do minor editing on spelling and grammar in the writing stage, but don’t get too bent out of shape about it, because that’s not the idea of the writing stage. The idea is to get a first draft (or in the case of NaNo, half a first draft in a month).

OOPS — back to writing!

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Today’s excerpt, written yesterday:

I considered my options for getting off-campus. There was a riot outside the building and my captors within. I didn’t believe the police, or the Guard who had joined them, would be any more sparing of bullets than my captors had been.

The steam tunnel doors hung open. I had heard about the legendary steam tunnel system — maps of the tunnels existed, handed down and providing adventures to generations of students who could withstand the heat. The cameras that protected students from heatstroke no longer functioned, so the risk was higher than in bygone eras. I taught all of this in Intro to Anthropology each year.

I, however, did not have a map, and imagined myself wandering through the tunnels, some of which were low enough that the explorer had to crawl through. There were rumors of dead ends and caved-in sections — wait. Somewhere in my notes, up in my office, I had documentation of a Charles DeWitt who had, in 2020, painted guide signs in glow-in-the dark paint. All I needed was a flashlight, which I found on a hardhat by the tunnel doors. I flipped the switch; the light functioned.

Now, a destination. I thought about where I was, Hartley Hall, at the north central point of the Quad. My destination was under the Quad to Alfred Wyndham Lab, the science building nearest the east gate. I knew that the tunnel would be anything but straight, given how the tunnels branched out to serve all the buildings.

What I would need besides the light? I took a long drink from the utility sink in the corner and relieved myself in a dank, muddy corner — I didn’t care about anything but being safe. What else — lock picks. I didn’t have lockpicks in case any doors were locked. Lockpicks — I searched for the smallest bladed screwdrivers I could find, precision screwdrivers, which I found in a large drawer on a workbench labeled SHOP. I swiped the two smallest screwdrivers and a diamond file so I could file them thin if needed. My father, the cryptographer, had taught me how to disable locks from simple tumbler locks to advanced cryptobiometric ones.

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Then I charged through the doors into the unknown.