A Game of Pants

In life, I'm a panster extraordinaire. Most of the things I've done were accomplished with little or no forethought, and to be honest, I don't see any correlation with thinking ahead and the quality of the outcome.

Take my house, for example. The husband and I chose it after only having seen a handful of other places. It cost a little more than we'd been hoping, so we waved our contingencies, hoping to get the jump on other people who were bidding up the price.

(It was like this, but much, much, much smaller.)

(For those of you who don't know, "waiving contingencies" means that we waived out right to back out of the deal if an inspection showed there was something wrong with the house, or if our financing fell through.)

Well, we got the house. And you know what? Lots of things broke! Our place is over a hundred years old and the previous occupants remodeled it themselves, knowing they wouldn't have to live with the long-term effects of their workmanship.

But here's the thing– even though we've had to replace every last inch of the plumbing including the sewer line heading out to the street, our gamble still worked out. The newly-gentrifying neighborhood has continued to gain value, great businesses and restaurants moved in close by. Our 'hood contains a lot of older residents who own their homes outright, so no lost a home to foreclosure in the downturn.

In other words, the pantsing worked.

Plenty of my choices haven't worked out– but oddly enough, a lot of that stuff was planned. In my experience, planning ahead leads me to try to force a round peg in a square hole. As if with enough organizational scaffolding I can live with a situation that isn't quite right.

Despite my love of the seat-of-my-pants lifestyle, I've generally tried to plot my books. Largely, I blame Jessa Slade. My CP, Danica Avet, referred me to her site for plotting help, and I panicked. There was so much to plot!! I'd never considered that a person COULD be that organized, much less that I should try to be.

Between Jessa Slade and Holly Lisle, I got into a fairly involved plotting habit. I took notes, drew maps, sketched characters. Soon I was adding in suggestions from Sascha Illyvich's Male POV course. And most recently, I've learned about Monomyth and The Hero's Journey and a whole new level of planning was born!

The result: a detailed, well-thought-out plan for a story that made absolutely no sense.

I can say with no hesitation that the more I plot, the more I create false-starts that need to be re-written. Case in point: my Mercury Rising sequel. I wrote 14k based on a detailed outline and had to ditch the entire thing and start from scratch.

The original version lacked…meat. It lacked an emotional core that made sense for the characters. It was all sizzle and no steak, all sauce and no pudding, all "vici" and no "sois."

So I'm giving up on plotting, at least for now. I'm not sad that I practiced the discipline. Just because I don't chart out the characters' goal, motivation, and conflict doesn't mean I don't bear those things in mind. I don't need to plan "work in the hero's issues with his father" to know I should address it. In all three of my first books I included aspects of the hero's relationship with his father, even though I didn't know I was supposed to. Cuz, y'know…I've seen Star Wars.

Similarly, in Mercury Rising when Dillon arrives at the cruise ship he encounters a kid standing guard at the door. I hadn't read about The Hero's Journey when I wrote that scene, and wasn't thinking, "I need to plot a Threshold Guardian." Rather, I needed Dillon to get on the boat and thought, "There should be a guy standing there. I have no idea why, but it just feels right."

Years ago, I took Physiology with a scary-hard professor. Students quaked in fear of his tests, and so did I until I learned the trick. Study your class notes, read the book, look over relevant anatomy. Memorize what you can, but when you sit down to take the test– forget all of it! Don't answer the questions based on what you studied…answer them based on common sense.

What constitutes common sense, of course, changes depending on our baseline knowledge. This is why studying and learning matter, whether it's in physiology, anatomy, or writing. But if you're like me, you can't rely on class notes. In fact, trying to think about class notes will only lead you in the wrong direction.

So if you're a pantster, when you sit down to write– forget everything you learned! Trust that the knowledge has seeped into the part of your brain that processes common sense. Then pants your ass off.

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How about you– are you a plotter or a panster? How do you integrate what you've learned with what comes naturally?