Pantsers vs. Plotters
by Judy Alter
Writing
habits are individual things. I have long admired people who can plot out each
chapter and each scene before they ever sit down to write. Then they have a
road map to follow. Some leave room for flexibility, for the inevitable changes
that occur when you write, but basically they know where they’re going. And
writing a synopsis? Easy peasy—it’s all there in the outline. Some writers use
storyboards or whiteboards to keep track of scenes and characters as they
write. Or computer programs which allow you to move scenes around and such.
I on
the other hand wander blindly about in a familiar world, since I know the
settings of my series novels, but with little idea of where I’m going. My
publisher now requests a synopsis before accepting a proposal. But recently
after I signed a contract, the manuscript began to take a different direction
and ended up nowhere near what the synopsis had indicated. When I saw this
developing, maybe halfway through, I wrote the managing editor who requested a
new synopsis. Fortunately, it passed muster. There’s been one intervening novel
since, but now I find my mind going back to the original theme of that earlier
project.
The
trouble, you see, is that I’m a pantser. I write by the seat of my pants. I
prefer to dash off a page of rough notes, get the first sentence, and see what
happens when I go from there. Sometimes what happens is magic. Events seem to
unfold of their own accord, characters tell me what’s going to happen, and the
plot shapes itself, often taking turns I hadn’t expected. Many seasoned authors
will tell you to listen to your characters, and they will tell you what’s going
to happen. The late western novelist Elmer Kelton used to talk about two of his
novels in which the characters took over his typewriter or computer. One was Buffalo Soldier, which he intended to
feature a newly freed slave who becomes a buffalo soldier (one of the Negro
regiments on the western frontier). But a Comanche chief kept demanding equal
time, and eventually the book chronicled both their stories—the buffalo
soldier’s rise in life as the Comanche’s way of life disappeared. The other was
The Good Old Boys, which he wrote at
his dying father’s bedside and based on all the stories his father, a longtime
ranch foreman, had told him. The characters, he used to say, took over like a
cold-jawed horse with a bit.
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I
don’t find it usually happens that easily, and sometimes I worry about what’s
going to happen next. I also worry a lot if the manuscript is going to reach an
acceptable word limit—I have a tendency to rush through things, so that my
friend and beta reader is always telling me to slow down. He also often tells
me I have too much going on in a book—which I wonder doesn’t spring from my
desperate attempt to pad the length. But once I finish it, I rarely make major
changes, like moving whole sections around, eliminating characters (I rejected
that suggestion recently), and the like.
One
trick that works for me when I settle down to write: set a goal of a thousand
words a day. I wrote a novel that way earlier this year and found it worked
well.
But
everyone has their own methods. What’s yours?
Judy Alter is the author of
two mysteries series—Kelly O’Connell Mysteries, including Skeleton in a Dead Space, No Neighborhood for Old Women, Trouble in a
Big Box, and the just-published Danger
Comes Home, and the Blue Plate Café Mysteries, which debuted this year with
Murder at the Blue Plate Café, with Murder at Tremont House to come next
year. Her books are available on Amazon and Smashwords. Also the author of
several historical novels set in the American West, she is the recipient of
Western Writers of America Owen Wister Award for Lifetime Achievement and several other
awards.
