Pantzers and Liners
“Are you a pantzer or a liner?” I was asked the other day in my writing group. Being a new writer, I wondered if I was supposed to give a secret handshake, or if was I being pranked. I had seen people fall for the “Do you want to go snipe hunting?” question in its various forms over the years. The person must have seen the panicked, querulous look in my eyes because they kindly rephrased the question. “Do you write by the seat of your pants, or do you outline?” I gave myself a mental head slap and took a deep breath. It’s complicated.
I discovered outlines in the sixth grade. I was the new kid in the middle of the year, and on my first day, the teacher came around with a jar filled with slips of paper. She explained we would spend the next month writing a report on the name of the country we pulled out of the jar. I got India. Our first assignment was to write an outline of our report. I had no clue what the teacher meant but, of course, refused to ask. Sitting at the lunch table, I overheard the cool kids say an outline was a paragraph you wrote describing your report, and the easiest thing to do was make a list from the bold subtitles in the encyclopedia. CHECK! Hearing this, I decided the rest of sixth grade was going to be a breeze. At dinner that night, I told my parents about my day and proudly presented my paragraph on India.
“No, that’s not an outline,” they informed me and took me, feet dragging and fingernails clawing the ground, down the path of Roman numerals, upper case letters, and numbers with parenthesis. After a night of dramatics and theatrics (entirely on my part), we compromised. I would do the stupid outline their way, and if the teacher said it was wrong, they would tell her they FORCED me to do it their way. I smugly agreed. They were wrong, and I knew it. After all, I was in sixth grade, and they were…well…parents. The next day everyone turned in their single sheet of paper with their paragraph, and red-faced, I turned in my five stapled pages with Roman numerals, uppercase letters, and numbers. Suffice it to say my parents were right AGAIN, but we don’t need to go into that list.
That day, Outliner and I became the dynamic duo, and his tag-along brother, Pro/Con List, joined our merry band. In college, I supplemented my meager Ramen Noodle budget by selling my outlined notes. People found the outlines easy to understand and guaranteed an “A.” Need to choose what to do? My friend Pro/Con List was by my side as I tackled boyfriends, jobs, and moves. When it was time to plan a wedding—Mr. Outline walked me confidently down the aisle. New project at work? Challenge accepted, and the boys tag-teamed to make me a rockstar. They never let me down…until…the baby. People, I spent months reading books, taking notes, highlighting with my fat yellow marker, outlining, and making lists. Let me tell you something, babies are pure pantzers. They don’t know or care about following an outline, and you don’t want to know what they do to a list.
Things changed in December 2020. Pantzer arrived on the scene uninvited. The nemesis of Mr. Outline and Pro/Con List in their khakis, button-down oxford shirts, and perfectly parted hair, Pantzer looked like a cross between Beetlejuice and the Riddler. Mad as a March hare, he danced around my brain in his garish outfit with a wild tale that mesmerized me. Shaking my head and regaining my sanity, I flicked him away rudely. I had all I needed in life with Outline and List. Irritated, Pantzer hurled a Mardi Gras missile at me on the treadmill one day. But instead of beads and doubloons, I opened the plastic grocery bag to find characters and sarcastic one-liners. Continuing his advance like a general, Pantzer showed up the following day with a line of wheelbarrows and dumpsters containing more Mardi Gras flotsam—plots, motives, methods of mayhem, locations, backstories, outfit descriptions, and future stories joined the characters and one-liners he had stunned me with earlier. There was a story in this mess, but I couldn’t make sense of it.
Out of the corner of my eye, I caught sight of Outliner sorting through the jumbled pile Pantzer had dumped on the front yard of my brain. He put things in piles, categorized them, and laid them out in an order that made sense. A month later, with an occasional Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride visit from Pantzer, we had an outline for A Boat for a Goat…in Excel, but that’s another story.
Pantzer still shows up from time to time, full of off-the-wall ideas, and Outliner just smiles during these visits, picks up his trusty pen, and begins making Roman numerals.
I discovered outlines in the sixth grade. I was the new kid in the middle of the year, and on my first day, the teacher came around with a jar filled with slips of paper. She explained we would spend the next month writing a report on the name of the country we pulled out of the jar. I got India. Our first assignment was to write an outline of our report. I had no clue what the teacher meant but, of course, refused to ask. Sitting at the lunch table, I overheard the cool kids say an outline was a paragraph you wrote describing your report, and the easiest thing to do was make a list from the bold subtitles in the encyclopedia. CHECK! Hearing this, I decided the rest of sixth grade was going to be a breeze. At dinner that night, I told my parents about my day and proudly presented my paragraph on India.
“No, that’s not an outline,” they informed me and took me, feet dragging and fingernails clawing the ground, down the path of Roman numerals, upper case letters, and numbers with parenthesis. After a night of dramatics and theatrics (entirely on my part), we compromised. I would do the stupid outline their way, and if the teacher said it was wrong, they would tell her they FORCED me to do it their way. I smugly agreed. They were wrong, and I knew it. After all, I was in sixth grade, and they were…well…parents. The next day everyone turned in their single sheet of paper with their paragraph, and red-faced, I turned in my five stapled pages with Roman numerals, uppercase letters, and numbers. Suffice it to say my parents were right AGAIN, but we don’t need to go into that list.
That day, Outliner and I became the dynamic duo, and his tag-along brother, Pro/Con List, joined our merry band. In college, I supplemented my meager Ramen Noodle budget by selling my outlined notes. People found the outlines easy to understand and guaranteed an “A.” Need to choose what to do? My friend Pro/Con List was by my side as I tackled boyfriends, jobs, and moves. When it was time to plan a wedding—Mr. Outline walked me confidently down the aisle. New project at work? Challenge accepted, and the boys tag-teamed to make me a rockstar. They never let me down…until…the baby. People, I spent months reading books, taking notes, highlighting with my fat yellow marker, outlining, and making lists. Let me tell you something, babies are pure pantzers. They don’t know or care about following an outline, and you don’t want to know what they do to a list.
Things changed in December 2020. Pantzer arrived on the scene uninvited. The nemesis of Mr. Outline and Pro/Con List in their khakis, button-down oxford shirts, and perfectly parted hair, Pantzer looked like a cross between Beetlejuice and the Riddler. Mad as a March hare, he danced around my brain in his garish outfit with a wild tale that mesmerized me. Shaking my head and regaining my sanity, I flicked him away rudely. I had all I needed in life with Outline and List. Irritated, Pantzer hurled a Mardi Gras missile at me on the treadmill one day. But instead of beads and doubloons, I opened the plastic grocery bag to find characters and sarcastic one-liners. Continuing his advance like a general, Pantzer showed up the following day with a line of wheelbarrows and dumpsters containing more Mardi Gras flotsam—plots, motives, methods of mayhem, locations, backstories, outfit descriptions, and future stories joined the characters and one-liners he had stunned me with earlier. There was a story in this mess, but I couldn’t make sense of it.
Out of the corner of my eye, I caught sight of Outliner sorting through the jumbled pile Pantzer had dumped on the front yard of my brain. He put things in piles, categorized them, and laid them out in an order that made sense. A month later, with an occasional Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride visit from Pantzer, we had an outline for A Boat for a Goat…in Excel, but that’s another story.
Pantzer still shows up from time to time, full of off-the-wall ideas, and Outliner just smiles during these visits, picks up his trusty pen, and begins making Roman numerals.
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