The writing world is officially divided: in the game of 80-100K words on paper, there are planners and there are pantsers—those of us who ‘write by the seat of our pants.’ I imagine for the planners, life is quite a bit easier, but I’d also venture to waver it isn’t nearly as exciting—and if the plan is stuck to, the end result is likely to attain a fraction of the depth it otherwise could have.
Hear me out. In the opening weeks of my courses, students are always resistant to this idea. It runs counter to nearly everything anyone has ever been told and so it’s no wonder. But here’s the problem: an outline is often a necessary evil in the business of publishing (along with book summaries), but an outline has nothing to do with your novel. An outline—at its best—is a structural overview, which by its very nature relies on black and white, straightforward cause and effect, to create a reductionist view of what a book might be. But if you apply some commonsense, the problem will quickly present itself: a novel is the exact opposite. In a novel, characters’ personalities, challenges, and conflicts create the action and it’s a reader’s attachment to them via the way these things play out that leads to suspense. It often doesn’t have very much to do with anything black and white—in fact, if it’s black and white then you wouldn’t have much of a story, would you?—and rather than reductionist thinking, a novelist’s trained eye looks at the same things everyone else does, but with the ability to break it down into endless grey shades that make readers consider the world in a new way. So, you see the problem.
Surely this pantsing will lead to a good amount of wasted effort, no? Wasted? No. Unused, most definitely. But this is part of the process. You can’t improve upon something that doesn’t exist. Your characters only exist as sentences that make up scenes in the pages of your manuscript. Describing what these scenes might be, in the manner of an outline, has nothing to do with it. Until they exist in those scenes, created by sentences that string together action, they do not exist. Just jot down an idea and then attempt to write it into a novel scene; then see how much the two entities have in common…
Soon enough—somewhere around week three—my students come in exhilarated, barely able to share their thoughts on the magical occurrence they experienced this week: the character came to life and brought the story forward. This idea was no longer the esoteric talk of literary snobs and black turtleneck wearers! It wasn’t kooky artist-speak either! It was, in fact, true! To the students, exactly what needed to happen next became obvious, because they’ve come to know that unique character so well that they know what he would do under the circumstances he’s been presented with. Try finding that information in an outline: if you do, your character will quickly make mincemeat of your plans; I promise.
But that isn’t the only benefit of pantsing. The second part is equally exciting, even if it takes a bit longer to wise to. If you leave yourself open to any possibility of plot events, you’ll wind up with a richer story. The reason is you haven’t experienced what this character has (even if you have, you wouldn’t have experienced it in exactly the same way, and not for the purposes of fiction), so how dare you believe you’ve got the ability to know how things will go for them when they meander along their way? So, get to know your characters as best you can—by placing them in scenes and seeing what they’ll do, by researching their lifestyles for authenticity and action ideas—and let those pants lead you where they may.
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