When it comes to outlining vs. improvising, I’ve found that we all do the same steps in a different order.
Many writing conversations (whether on panels, in blog posts, etc.) discuss a plotter vs. pantser binary, plotters being outliners, authors who plan work thoroughly before beginning, while the pantser, from the expression “fly by the seat of your pants” plunges into writing the beginning without a plan. I myself am certainly the plotter archetype, producing reams of notes, spreadsheets, and outlining a whole series before beginning Chapter 1, but the more I talk with friends who fit the pantser archetype, the clearer it becomes that the two methods are not as different as they’re made to seem. The real difference is not what we do, but what order we do it in, which steps we do before, which during, and which after drafting the text.
I’ll describe my own process briefly to get some vocabulary down. I start with a long process of world building, with character creation as a part of it, in which nifty concepts and ideas for people shaped by them appear and connect together, forming a world and its tensions. Along this will develop a sense of mood or emotion, and the overall long stages of a story (mystery, then tragedy, then crisis, then hope, or crisis first, then mystery, then hope, then tragedy, etc.). Once the world and characters are developed enough for me to have a sense of conflicts that can arise, or changes or choices the characters could face, I sit down to outline, starting by writing down the few big moments that I know have to come, and working out their necessary order (ABC discovery is made, character X meets character Y, the conflict between D and F turns to violence, the reader learns about G, etc.).
Noting each big moment down as a paragraph with gaps between, I then fill in the additional chapters that need to happen before and after each major turning point. Often some events need to happen between certain other events in the story in order for them to work (i.e. we need to meet Tiny Tim before the Ghost of Christmas Future foretells his fate) while other times there is flexibility about the order (do we hear the creator of Jurassic Park describe his touching backstory before or after we see the villain’s death?). I spend a while fitting all the necessary chapters into order, often moving flexible ones around, thinking through how the reader experience would be different if we change the order (i.e. should we get to hear Juliet talking alone on her balcony before Romeo addresses her, so we already know their love is mutual, or should he instead address her before she speaks, so we don’t yet know if she loves him or not?). As I play with the order of chapters, I think through a number of elements of pacing including:
- pace of revelation (making sure too many details or revelations aren’t all in a pile at once)
- knowledge and reminders (the reader must know Fact X before the chapter that depends on it, and if Fact X was introduced too long before then the reader may need a reminder)
- individual character arcs (how often particular characters appear, to make sure we don’t get all of Character X’s appearances in a row and none in ¾ of the book, unless that’s intentional)
- thematic arcs (making sure there are several chapters where a theme like Providence or custodianship is important before the key chapter where that theme comes to a climax)
- emotional arc (making sure tense and distressing chapters have restful or cathartic ones in between to give the reader a break).
- subdivision (do these all need to be separate chapters? can some merge?)
Once everything is in order and looks workable, I reread my outline several times, imagining on each pass that I’m a reader invested in a particular favorite character, faction, side, theme etc., and make sure it all makes sense and feels satisfying at the end. Time then to write paragraph one.
This outlining process usually takes me about six months.
Now, let’s look at the so-called pantser.
When I talk to friends who start writing without an outline, they often describe having partial plans in mind at the start. Many describe not just having some characters and world building complete, but having a sense of certain key events that are coming (a crisis at the middle, a revelation at the 2/3 mark, a tragedy at 3/4, knowing what the ending must be like). Often writers describe it with a metaphor: the shape of the story, the key beats of the story, the arc of the story, the movements of the story like a symphony, the story as a wiggly line rising and falling. Such friends describe writing toward the next key moment in this shape/rhythm/arc, thinking Can I write X event yet? No, first Character-F needs to arrive, and the reader needs to learn what K is. This is exactly the same thing I do when I start my outline, writing down the few big moments I know have to come, and then filling in the additional chapters that need to come in between.
Often such friends discuss coming to a point and realizing they needed another chapter earlier, or need to rearrange chapters—this is exactly the same thing I do when I’m moving around the order of potential scenes and chapters in my outline, testing them out before and after the big beats.
These friends also describe the common experience of coming to the end of a draft or section and reading over it, realizing that the pacing is too tight, or a character needed to be introduced earlier, or needing to go back to insert the creation of X which is necessary later to solve problem Y—this is exactly what I do when I’m rereading my list of chapters thinking about whether the character arcs, emotional arc and such.
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Too Like the Lightning
We’re doing the same steps, just in a different order, and if friends who don’t outline often say they take months tweaking, and pausing in the middle to rethink a section, or going back and adding details at the end etc., I take months making the outline, so it even adds up to the same amount of time.
I also talk to friends who plan even less before beginning, who jump into writing Chapter 1 without a sense of beats, or world, or characters, just meandering along, but even in this case when I talk to them about how they develop the world as they go, how the characters they invent develop, the things they describe are exactly the experiences I have while doing my world building before starting my outline. And they too describe steps like coming to a chapter and thinking about what needs to be set up next, jumping back to add foreshadowing, or writing (“by instinct”) a tranquil, healing chapter, feeling that a more intense one will come next. Same things once again, just different order.
I think it’s important to attack the plotter v. pantser binary because I often hear people express a sense that plotting is somehow better, smarter, cleverer; that writing pantser-style is somehow sloppy or more amateur. The attitude is often that, if we have a river to cross, pantsers are people who just dive in and swim while plotters are clever enough to build a boat—when I described it that way to Jo Walton and Ken Liu (both pantsers by the binary) both laughed and agreed that’s what it often feels like. But it isn’t that I build a boat and they don’t, it’s that I build the whole boat first, while they assemble just enough boards to make the hull and hop on, carrying a pack of planks with them, assembling the rest of the boat during the process of crossing the river. That’s pretty clever too!
It isn’t just that both methods get across the river in the end—we really do all the same boat-building steps as well, just at different stages, some of us imagining a reading experience while it’s still in outline form, others writing it out and feeling out the pacing, arcs, themes, revelations etc. as they go. Both work, and so do various hybrid methods that people use—and it seems more useful to note that we’re all doing the same things in a different order than to value one order of operations more highly than the other.
Ada Palmer is a historian, working primarily on the Renaissance, Italy, censorship, radical thought, science, books and printing, as well as manga and anime. She writes the blog ExUrbe.com, does the Ex Urbe Ad Astra podcast with Jo Walton discussing the craft of writing, and composes SF & Mythology-themed music for the a cappella group Sassafrass. The novels of her Terra Ignota quadrilogy—Too Like the Lightning, Seven Surrenders, The Will to Battle , and Perhaps the Stars—are available from Tor Books.
I have always mixed the methods. I outline the major scenes and plot points then do a bit of freestyle to bind them together in a fun yet logical manner. I compare it to putting jewels in order for a bracelet then creating the filigree to bind them together into a bracelet.
From my own experience with writing and watching other writers’ careers, I always suggest to newer writers that being a pantster has major disadvantages when you are a professional writer. Too many tangents need to be pared away, or book beginnings are tossed and must be started over. That’s fine when you are learning your stuff, but deadlines are a harsh reality later when you don’t have time for this.
I’ve read about this topic before and IIRC readers were asked whether they think certain books were written by a plotter or a pantser and the result effectively was that usually readers won’t be able to tell the difference because, as you’ve put it, you’re doing the same steps, just in a different order.
So I will readily believe that at the end of the day it doesn’t make much difference for readers what method the author has used.
For standalone novels, that is.
The problem, in my humble amateur view, seems to come in when we’re talking about multi-volume series telling a very long story. The fact, the hardly any author can afford to write such a series in its entirety before publishing the first book means that the earlier volumes effectively get set in stone once they are published. Once published, they can’t be revised anymore.
The longer the series is, the I would expect authors who are on the pantser end of the spectrum to run into considerable problems (unless they’re lucky). Not plotting ahead sooner or later is bound to bite you in the rear end, I think.
This is what I think has happened to Martin (possible several times now) and is what causes him to apparently be stuck.
I love this! Nothing wrong with pantsering. Finishing a novel is a major accomplishment!
I do enjoy comparing notes on the process with other writers, though. My own writing experience is elusive, capricious, and prone to appearing in absurd hypo-manic bursts that totally consume my life. It’s completely out-of-step with how I do anything else.
That’s absolute nonsense about Martin. A character was introduced in A Dance With Dragons who had a complex backstory, and seemed to come from nowhere. But when I re-read the earlier volumes I found a condensed version of his backstory mentioned and set up in two different places waaaaaay back in A Game of Thrones. It’s very clear that Martin is on top of the material, as I discussed in my spoiler review of DwD back in 2012, https://www.tor.com/2011/09/02/much-and-more-a-spoiler-review-of-george-rr-martins-a-dance-with-dragons/.
I do academic writing too (humanities), and used to be a plotter before starting an article or longer project, but these days I am really more of a pantser (great word!) and just want to see what’s going to happen when I bring some different materials to analyze together. The result in the end is about the same, and it also takes me about the same amount of time. I end up being slightly surprised in both methods when they work right. Different kind of writing, but at least from my experience, just wanted to second that one way doesn’t feel more rigorous or clever than the other to me!
@5. This is where experience kicks in. You become so confident in your writing that you can pantster all you want because your inner logical outliner is also working in the background. After my fifth novel, the shorter novels were rarely outlined beyond a very general one because I knew I had control over the process. I’m the same way with my nonfiction.
The only thing I ever wrote that was wholly by the seat of my pants was a short novel for National Novel Writing Month, at the maddening pace of 1500 words per day, which I went into with no clear idea of where it would go, only an intention to put in all the cool stuff that I liked in books when I was younger. And things kind of bubbled around with a vague sense of order until it ended.
Everything else has been done with the style you describe, Ada, which I think of as a kind of “loose pants” style. I usually write a significant chunk of the beginning, see the ending and write it, and then fill in the middle with scenes that often shift here and there to make it all work.
Perhaps whether you are a plotter or pantser depends upon how much you enjoy (or at least can put up with) rewriting. I’m a major plotter, and much of the reason for that is that I like knowing that my output each day is (usually) in something very close to its final form. A particular scene pays off what’s been hinted at before and looks ahead to what’s to come.
Sometimes I haven’t done a good enough job on my outline and I have to go back and delete a bunch or copy and/or put better material in. I do it when I have to, but I don’t like it. I much prefer writing in that straight line, headed directly toward the ending.
I’ve long considered myself a Pantser but now think of myself as more of an “intuitive” writer, thanks to the QuitBook series by Becca Symes. That label/description works better for me than “pantser” because I do a fair amount of character work and world building and even plotting, if only a few scenes ahead at a time. I once read somewhere that my style is like driving down a dark highway at night, seeing the city lights in the far distance but only about 3 lines on the pavement in front of me.
The primary idea I took from her book is pretty much the same idea as this article: there is no one right way, all of us will get all of the story elements in there no matter the order, and the only “best” way to write is the one that results in a good story.
I heartily recommend her series, but this is the book on being Intuitive –> https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60751973-dear-writer-are-you-intuitive
First off: thanks to Ada, for writing such an interesting / helpful piece!
I will offer some comments, comparing writing methods to sculpting methods — since I have both of those things as major interest areas, within my hobby life.
I’d say there’s some cross-over, even in those wildly different end goals. Over in the sculpting world, what I see is not so much a “plotter” or a “pantser” binary, but people who divide what they see of the sculpting world into “additive sculpting style” or a “subtractive sculpting style”.
The former starts with either literally nothing (no internal armature of any kind) and gradually builds things up, by adding one blob of clay (or wax, or epoxy putty, or plaster, or other malleable sculpting material) at a time. Or maybe there’s an internal armature of some kind to build upon — (usually some form of metal wires in smallish scales; and harder materials like metal pipes or pieces of hardwood, for larger scaled-or-sized items) — but even the people who use internal armatures, inside “additive” sculptures, don’t often agree on how rigid such an armature should be. At the other end of the sculpting spectrum are people who would rather start with solid blocks of material, and carve away what is called the “negative space”. This can range from carving pumpkins, all the way up to carving blocks of marble or granite.
My point is: the more “additive” a person is, the less comfortable they seem to be with the “subtractive” methods of sculpting. And vice-versa.
Both seem to be thinking, “How could you even do that?” because it’s foreign to “their” methods; it’s outside their Comfort Zone. And most of the time, people (sculptors) in one camp, only see their way, and the other camp’s way — but as Ada points out, there may be significant overlap; and it may not even be true that only those pair of methods are “valid”. I’m all for looking at both methods, and stealing as many tricks from both ways of doing things, as I can easily / efficiently apply to my own working “ways”.
I’ve noticed, over time, though, that virtually no one is purely “additive” as a sculptor, without ever also occasionally being “subtractive”. I imagine the opposite is true, too: even the well-known sculpting giants of the past first used clay models, in a smallish scale, to work out the final wood or marble carving process. These smaller “test sculpts” were sort of their “outlines”.
One thing I’m finding fascinating is that there’s also a lot of disagreement among various sculptors who, on the surface, seem to be using much the same materials (for example, epoxy putties, over a wire armature) but who still end up having major disagreements over the purpose of an armature; in other words, how rigidly a sculptor needs to or “should” have the wires flexible and/or totally “locked in” as far as pose, and related things. Some have a working method where if they can’t make major changes even at the last moment, they consider that armature to be too rigid, too limiting.
To that kind of a sculptor, it’s “wrong” to not have a super flexible armature. They would argue that the armature absolutely MUST allow for changes, at every single stage of the process; right up until the last moment the project gets worked on.
A different kind of sculptor sees the opposite as being true: they feel that if the “stick figure” (the bare armature) isn’t posed perfectly, before any other materials get added on, over that armature, that’s (to them) “wrong” and “not good” and maybe even reason to hyperventilate. To them, working on those later stages without the “closure” of a perfectly proportioned, and perfectly posed armature, is like putting the horse in front of the cart; or maybe trying to build a roof for a house, before laying the foundation.
I used to wonder about those “flexible” versus “fixed in stone” ways of doing things, until I realized it probably has to do with a very personal thing, regarding “seeking closure” or “maintaining your freedom”.
If you as a person NEED “closure,” up front, and you can’t be comfortable without it, you’re going to end up siding with the folks that want a carefully measured inner armature, with every bone’s length marked out, at every “bend point,” with mathematical precision, long before you “add clay”.
If a person FEARS closure, and LOVES “winging it,” that way of doing things is going to feel like Houdini being wrapped in a straight jackets, with all sorts of extra chains around it. You’re going to want restrictions gone: the straight jacket cut into scraps, and the chains melted into iron scrap.
I’ve heard sculptors who call themselves “pushers” (additive folks) talking with “carvers” (subtractive folks) with both saying, “How do you even do that!?” because they admired or even loved each other’s end results, but the ways the other people were using, were totally “foreign” to them.
Not everyone likes the Myers-Briggs way of looking at temperament, but I’m a fan of that way of looking at the born-into-place differences that seem to be simply part of how human beings simply “are”. As one of the thinking types, who loves closure, I’m apt to side with the sculptors who want a perfectly measured armature, before anything goes over that. But I can see how logical and rational it is, to allow for changes, too — hence my desire to get past “binary thinking” and start opening my options up.
In my studies of other sculptor’s methods, I don’t see one way or the other being “the one and only way that sculpting can be done”. Good work, even great work, ends up being possible for both kinds of sculptors. For me, it is important to recognize that neither is inherently “always better”. Context often means a lot. Tips and tricks used by one kind of sculptor (or writer) are sort of “invisible tools”: I want as big a toolbox as I can reasonably have! So I want to study both kinds of sculptors, hoping I can “steal the best tricks” from as many sculptors as I can learn something from.
To work towards summing up: I loved Ada’s thoughts! (And the other folks who made comments.) In a different context, I see that same “I need closure, as soon as possible” internal need, versus an “I will always need flexibility” internal need — which ends up causing big differences between artists or crafts people, in both the sculpting world and the writing world. Psychologically speaking, the biggest “need” seems to be (as Ada seems to be saying?) to know who you are, and where your comfort zone or zones begin and end. Find ways you are comfortable working; and then stick with whatever makes you feel you are on the path that you need to be on.
For me, that’s likely going to be studying both ways of doing things, to have more “tricks” I can use. If one toolbox isn’t working well, at a given moment, I’ll use the other one. Or at least, that’s the plan for my own future writing efforts. I’m in a transition period, writing-wise, where what worked for me, in the past, may not be super-efficient, or even “good enough” for the future. I want to be able to be “more gooder” at the idea of plotting (using story beats, perhaps, in a “sort-able list” way) mainly due to realizing that I tend to be a re-re-re-re-etc-re-re-writer, and that works for smallish things, but won’t let me get anything (of any worth) done, for any writings I do that need to be tight, and well-paced, and so on. With the how-to articles I wrote (and had published) in the past, for various of my hobbies, it was enough for me to be a “Pantser” and to jump in, with only an internal, unwritten idea of where I was hoping to end up. If a section of the text ended up on the cutting room floor, it was no big time loss. If I’m going to be writing things much, much longer, I need better efficiency! So I’m hoping to figure out two things, up front: “what do I want to write” as my first goal; and “how do I want to write it” as my second goal. I see a benefit to being more of a “Plotter” in the future, mainly because it feels a lot easier to “kill my darlings” if they’re only a one-line “story beat” rather than a fully-fleshed out thing that’s all polished, but needs to be cut out.
Anyway, thanks again to Ada for thoughts on such an interesting topic! I’m seeing “plotting versus pantsing” as less and less of a “binary limitation” and more of a reason to expand the tools, in both of those toolboxes!
I can imagine an extreme form of ‘panster’ writing, akin to Lazy GM ideas. You make up a starting point and characters, then write them reacting to each other, without a goal. Pros: potentially very naturalistic, may be easier for some people. Cons: may not go to a satisfying ending.
But I could believe that hardly any published authors do this, though I’m fairly sure some fanfic authors do. (It helps when the characters are handed to you.)
I did speculate that part of GRRM’s delay is due to his having started that way, and then having an ending in mind but characters who don’t want to go to his ending. But it’s pure speculation, I don’t know the books the way Jo does!
I did the extreme pantser thing myself once, successfully. I had a term paper to do for a philosophy class, could NOT think of a topic and had procrastinated on getting help from the prof, then at the literal last minute had the idea of “I make up dialogues in my head a lot, why not just have dead philosophers talking with each other about the stuff from class?” Whipped it out in a few hours, no real revision apart from proof-reading, and the prof called it the best paper I’d ever done for him (which I did find odd, and wondered if he had a bias toward dialogues.)
Of course, that was like 10 pages, tops, not novel or series of novels. And pure dialogue, no scenery or descriptive writing. But man, it felt *easy*…
[Lazy GM advice: the GM shouldn’t try to plot out a story, just have a scenario and NPCs with goals, then roleplay the NPCs reacting to PC actions, or doing their things if the PCs don’t get in their way.]
I’m a plotser. I do outline, I do have a good idea of where I’m going and what the characters are likely to be doing–and then a character runs off and joins a band. And *then* it turns out they had to do it so the ending I pretty much want will happen in a way that was far more logical than the way I had it originally.
Also, about two thirds into a first draft, I realize I hate some of the characters but I can’t actually kill them off. So I write a death scene for them anyway, because I can, and set them aside. After that, I stop, write down all the stuff that has to happen to get to the ending, and what order makes the most sense.
The best thing is when I get my last line in advance. After that, my characters can join all the bands they want, and things will *happen* to make sure I get to that last line.