Are You a Plotter Or a Pantser?
Before I started my novel, which is still in the early stages, I looked at approaches to writing and discovered plotting and pantsing. Now, plotting, as you may be aware, involves planning your story, mapping out your direction, plot and characters so you’re writing with a well-defined structure. Pantsing, on the other hand, involves writing by the seat of your pants, so to speak, without a fucking clue what you’re doing. You just write and let the journey take you.
I think by nature, I’m a pantser. I’m a spontaneous person who flies out with bullshit pretty easily. The problem with pantsing, I’ve found so far, as that it can get you into trouble. Without proper planning, you may well write yourself into a corner. Pantsing is great in that it gets you into a flow and some interesting work may fly out, but it often requires extensive effort in the editing phase. Plotting, on the other hand, is generally safer and requires less editing, but plotters could be more prone to writer’s block. They may struggle along the illusive path of perfectionism instead of just getting something out there.
I started my novel by pantsing, but then I was worried I might write myself in a corner and I did a spot of plotting. Not too much. Now I’m currently pantsing my way through the first quarter of my book. The reason I love pantsing is, at least for my personality, it’s better to just get something on the page, and sometimes I surprise myself where my subconscious – or perhaps more accurately my willy nilly compass – is guiding me. When I did my spot of plotting, I stopped writing for a couple of months. That phase did help me but I feel it’s the pantsing that’s getting the work done.
Personality Types
I imagine that for some people pantsing is awful. Too loose, haphazard and unstructured. These people (I’m just guessing here) may be more disciplined, methodical and thoughtful with their word choice. I used to be like this with my first blog, but I found it took me a lot longer to write this way.
Pantsing for me is great because it gets the ball rolling. I also don’t want to think too much about what I’m writing in the first draft and I’m much more motivated to edit something that’s already there instead of editing as I go. I’ll be doing some pantsing later tonight and while I often feel shit about the crap I’m pumping out as a pantser, it’s often not as bad as I initially thought.
Daily Word Count
Writing style aside, another thing that’s helped me tremendously so far is how many words I aim to get out daily. I find this part really affects my motivation. I started doing 1000 words a day, but I feel like I’m getting in more of a rhythm (and I’m much more consistent), when I’m writing 500 words a day. Don’t think it’s enough? Well, if you’re writing 500 words a day 6 days a week, like I currently am, you’ll end up with a 70,000 word draft (a decent size novel) in roughly five and a half months.
Some famous writers who stuck to the 500 words a day program are Graham Greene and Ernest Hemmingway. With making time for editing, dealing with an agent and marketing, you could get a book out a year at this rate.
I imagine that a combination of both plotting and pantsing is the best approach for me, but time will tell. I’ll check back on this post when I’m near the end of my novel and see if I’m still mostly a pantser.
What’s your approach?
