For years, I was a “pantser.”

I would go into a story with the bare minimum—a title, maybe an opening line, or some vague idea of what my story was about—and I’d try to make it work. Part of the fun was the journey; I wouldn’t always finish, but it was always about where the story would take me and the scenery along the way. I wrote a bunch of short stories that way between the ages of 17 and 23. It was all I knew.

When I tackled a novel for the first time, I had a significantly harder time. I kept getting tripped up and sidetracked. It was difficult to keep track of all the characters hanging out in the background. I couldn’t integrate them properly into the plot, and it all seemed chaotic. Inevitably, I wrote myself into a corner with no sensible way out. I started over, and legal pads and index cards became my best friends. I wrote out a scene overview on the pad and sketched out individual scenes on my index cards. I wrote character bios and profiles and had reference materials available as I wrote. It worked; the finished product eventually became The Favorite, and it won a small award.

I tried to go back to “pantsing” during my first NaNoWriMo some years back. I found that it was tough to get anything down, and what I did write wasn’t great. I mean, the first draft of everything is terrible, but this was utter nonsense. After the event was over, I scrapped what I had and started from scratch, this time with an outline and prep work did. I knew exactly what I wanted. I finished the first draft of that in 2016, and I’m currently editing it (and editing… and editing…).

I recently dug up some of those old short stories, the ones I wrote without a plan or an outline. There were some good bits in there, some concepts that survived the test of time, but for the most part, they were terrible, and all for the same reason. They were disorganized. The wrong things received too much focus, the worlds felt flat, and very few of them felt at all cohesive. I decided to take a few of them and re-plot them. I posted the first one—After Hours­—earlier this year.

Every so often, I’ll try to write a fiction piece without plotting, to see if I enjoy the scenery. It turns out that without a roadmap, I just get lost. I frequently joke that without a GPS, I can’t find my bathroom in a one-bedroom apartment. With my writing, that’s doubly true.

I’ve become a plotter, and there’s no going back.

#2018 #TheFavorite #writing #author #AfterHours #plotting #pantsing