Plotter or Pantser - Which is Better

Last week I showed you how the plotter approach and the pantser approach to writing can take an author to the same story. It really all depends on the writer’s process and their comfort zones. The pantser is open to new events the whole time he’s writing. He trusts the characters to lead him down an interesting and exciting path. If they don’t he can throw an obstacle in the hero’s way to make it exciting or just “drop a body” he’s writing a mystery.
But what if the storyline doesn’t lend itself to such an event? What happens when there’s a lull in the proceedings and the author has written himself into a situation where he really doesn’t know what happens next? The characters aren’t pushing in one direction or another and 40 thousand words into a novel he finds that there doesn’t seem to be anything exciting or fun around the corner?
We call this condition writer’s block and it is one of the potential dangers of writing as a pantser. Maybe three chapters back your story took a hard left and now you can see that a right would have led you to a much more satisfying place, plot-wise. You could be permanently stuck. Or you may decide that the only rational course of action is to (gulp) delete the last three chapters and start over writing from there.
As a plotter, I am virtually immune to writers block. My outline is a clearly stated series of scenes, one leading smoothly into the next. When I finish writing one scene I just look at my outline and begin the next one. I know where I’m going and I have a reliable road map to get there.
But characters develop in the writing. The more you say about them the more you know about them. They develop depth and dimension. And you wrote this outline months ago, before you realized that the cop’s wife would be this kind of courageous troublemaker. Back when the secondary villain was pretty much a blank with no real motivations of his own.
So now, 40 thousand words into your novel, a new idea occurs to you. A truly great idea. But an idea that won’t work in the outline as it exists now. And you’re faced with a painful choice. You either carry on with the story you have in mind, knowing it’s not as good as the alternate universe you just thought up, or…. You delete the last three chapters, make that right turn instead of the left, and then build an outline out from there, forward to the big finish you already conceived. The ending won’t change, but the path to get there is quite different.
The point is, there’s no real advantage to one style over the other aside from the writer’s comfort zone. Next week we’ll consider an alternative to being a plotter OR a pantser.