If you’re a seasoned novelist, you probably already have an answer to the standard question of whether you’re a plotter or a pantser. If not, read on…

A what or a what now?

Let me explain.

Writing a novel is no small thing. In fact, when I was studying text linguistics at university I learned that writing a long coherent text is the most complex cognitive task most of us will ever undertake.

(This explains why there are so many long incoherent texts out there. Turns out this stuff is hard – objectively, like. In case you were wondering.)

Obviously, there is no single Best Way to produce a novel, but many people argue that fiction authors can be divided into two camps: the plotters and the pantsers.

Plotters

Plotters plot.

(Yah. You’re welcome.)

This means that before they write down a word of their story, they create an outline (or possibly several, to increasingly fine levels of detail), they work up character histories, and they place their list of scenes into a traditional story format – often, the three-act structure that gets attributed to Aristotle although these days it’s mostly used in Hollywood.

My father, for example, plots his crime novels like a screenwriter, using the step outline method described at length in Robert McKee’s classic Story.

Before he ever writes a sentence for publication, he has achieved a cartographer’s grasp of the contours of his book, he knows who his characters are, what his inciting incident is, where the reversals will happen, how the tension is going to build and build and build, and what the payoffs are going to be.

This means that when he eventually starts to write, he can see where he’s going. He has been able to iron out plot issues and refine his characters and situations, all before investing any time producing large chunks of fiction.

Not much changes after this point: he works through his plan, following the instructions he’s laid down for himself until his draft is done.

Then, like practically all novelists throughout space and time, he rewrites until his head explodes, elbows aside the bloody debris, and rewrites some more. I’m afraid that’s unavoidable.

Pantsers

Pantsers, by contrast, fly by the seat of their … pants.

Yes.

(Any phonetic similarity to the German Panzers of World War II is entirely coincidental, I’m reasonably sure.)

They grab their main characters and a couple of interesting ideas for situations, and they dive right into the drafting, working intuitively, allowing the story to develop organically and going wherever it takes them.

I pantsed my first novel. (Belay that joke.) I started with my protagonist and some vague details about her milieu and what was going to happen to her, but I knew nothing about the mechanics of the plot, as such, until I’d extruded a complete draft.

(Here’s something I don’t like admitting: getting to “The End” that first time took more years than I could have believed possible. I fervently hope and intend that my future first drafts will have significantly shorter gestation times.)

In fact, I didn’t decide how my novel was going to end until I’d written several full drafts – yes, full drafts, with endings that in the event stayed more or less the same over time. I wasn’t convinced that I wouldn’t change tack completely until really quite late in the process.

Meanwhile, the themes I was working with in the book, the basic ideas I was trying to communicate, started to become clear to me after perhaps the fifth draft.

That’s the beauty of pantsing: you get to surprise yourself, you come up with electrifying insights, or twisty little curls of plot and characterisation, that would have been pretty difficult to articulate in advance.

Which Method Works Better?

Ahahaha, nope.

You already know the truth of this: it’s up to you to choose the method that works best for you and for the work you’re doing.

I’ll stick my neck out and suggest that plotting is probably better for, er, plot-driven books. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that most authors of thrillers, mysteries, and crime novels plot fairly carefully in advance.

But equally, there are many who don’t. Often, these are people who already have several novels under their belts and have developed an innate sense of what’s going to work.

My own experience of working without a plan was mixed, to be frank. It got me going, at a time when I’m fairly sure that making myself write an outline before I was allowed to start into my story would have stalled me completely.

Having done it, I can also understand the power of pantsing to uncover story truths that a more analytical approach might leave buried.

All in all, though, it was a frustrating apprenticeship, and I spent literally years wandering in the wilderness of my story before I got any kind of grip on it.

As I say, I suspect that pantsing works better for a more experienced writer than I was back in *mumblewumblecough*. Perhaps I’ll return to it later in my career.

Another Way

Nothing in life is ever neat, is it?

At one remove from the serried ranks of plotters and pantsers, holding themselves more than somewhat aloof, you will find those authors who follow the writing advice of Hamlet’s Polonius, “Neither a plotter nor a pantser be” (actually, that line never made it past Shakespeare’s fifth draft), and opt for a hybrid approach somewhere between the two extremes.

This can take various forms.

Some people work their way through the draft, planning a bit, writing a bit, returning to tweak the plan, writing some more.

Some write until they get stuck and then plan.

Some start with a key scene in the middle of the story and then figure out what comes before and after it.

For my second novel, now in first draft stage, I’ve been following the advice laid out in an occasionally irritating yet curiously inspiring book called How to Write a Novel Using the Snowflake Method, by Randy Ingermanson. If you can get past the Goldilocks-at-a-writing-conference frame story (complete with the Big Bad Wolf as literary agent) – which it turns out I can – this book contains a really solid novel planning system.

Being me, I haven’t stuck rigidly to the system, but it’s been helpful in getting me started.

The idea is that you begin with a bird’s-eye view and drill down in several stages, adding at each stage only the detail necessary to proceed.

This lessens the risk that you’ll faff about writing tonnes of material that won’t ultimately be useful. It keeps you focused on your main aim, which is to lead your reader through your imagined world along the path of your story.

Anyway, that’s the theory.

And that’s where I find myself at present, neither in the Plotter Division nor in the … sorry, couldn’t resist.

Call me a snowflake? At least it’s politically topical.