Pantsing Vs Plotting

It’s time to face one of the hardest stages of writing your novel: plotting. Are you a pantser or a plotter? If you’re not sure yet, NaNo guest Will Soulsby-McCreath will take us through their steps on how to figure out where you and your project fall on this particular spectrum. 

People will talk about being a pantser or a plotter like you’re going to land in one of these boxes and stay there for the rest of your life, but I just don’t think that’s true. I think it’s better represented as a galaxy: people orbit (or don’t orbit) different planets at different times and to different extents.

Plotting, pantsing, and plantsing all have their benefits and downfalls, which is why it’s important to try to figure out what will work for you as soon as possible.

Don’t forget, what works for you is defined as what gets you to the end of your manuscript with the most ease. 

So how do you figure out what planet you’re orbiting?

1. Take a look at your life.

Do you plan everything? Is your whole life set to a schedule? Do you love calendars and scheduling and time blocking?

Try plotting: it’s like a plan for your book.

Are you chaos incarnate? Does your house look like somebody upended a Bag Of Holding in it but you know where everything is (or at least the most likely 3 places to check)?

Try pantsing: follow your whims, keep the story in your head until you’re ready to write that particular bit of it. Personally, I fall into the mentality of “if I write an outline all my motivation is gone because now the ending is right there so what’s the point?”

Do you sit somewhere in the middle of these two extremes? Try to see if there’s one ideology you identify with more than the other.

Do you take a planner with you wherever you go/reliably use the planner app on your phone? Try plotting first. 

Do you set alarms or you’d never get out of the house on time? Try pantsing first.

2. Take a look at your writing preferences

Do you like editing? Or is it the worst part of the writing process?

Any pantser worth their… pants(?) will tell you that editing is the most important part of pantsing a book. Wrangling those unexpected plot twists to make them look intentional can be challenging but it’s also a lot of fun. So, if you love editing, pantsing might be the right route for you. If you hate editing, you might want to try plotting (note: plotting still needs editing, just often not as much).

3. Take a look at your reading preferences

Do you like examining books for story structure and fitting the plot to a pattern? Try plotting with your favorite story structure.

Do you find story structure to be boring at best and incomprehensible at worst?

Try pantsing, see where it gets you.

4. Try Different methods and don’t feel beholden to a particular label

There are so many potential outlining methods, and so many different points in your writing process you could decide to outline, you can still count yourself as a pantser while using outlining sometimes and vice versa, you could pants a bit but not a whole novel and still call yourself a plotter.

If you’re stuck in a scene (whether you’re pansting or plotting), try writing a quick bullet-pointed list of what you want to happen to get you to the next bit. If your outline got stilted and impossible somewhere around act 3, try free-writing (it’s like temporary pantsing).

And, if the thing you tried didn’t work, if it didn’t get you to the end of your manuscript, try the other thing. If you tried plotting but got bored halfway through your outline, or your character motivations didn’t match up with the actions you wanted them to take, try pantsing. If you couldn’t get to the end of your narrative by pantsing or got too tangled up in possible plot loops, try plotting instead.

Will Soulsby-McCreath (It’s pronounced “Souls-Bee-Muh-Kreth”) is absolutely not secretly 14 cats in a top hat. Obsessed with every way to tell a story and every possible use for one, Will had few choices other than becoming a writer. Too nosy for their own good they like to invest their time fixing other people’s problems, and when that doesn’t work they hand out stories to make you feel better, like their debut novel Merry Arlan: Breaking The Curse, which releases 26th October 2021. You can check out their website, social media, and short story blog to find out more.

Top Photo by Yannick Pulver on Unsplash