Losing the Plot: Writing by the Seat of Your Pants

Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. ~ EL Doctorow

Have you ever felt like you had to be a plotter or outliner to be a “real” or successful writer, or to get traditionally published?

Conferences, bookstore shelves, and MFA programs are filled with advice on how to plot a book. One could forgive a new—or not so new—writer for thinking that plotting is the “right way,” maybe the only way, to write. TL;DR: It’s not.

Have you tried all of the methods and then wondered what was wrong with you when they didn’t work? I have.

It honestly shocked me that I can’t plot. (Or rather, I can, but it never survives past the first scene, and that’s weeks of writing time I can’t get back.) I’m a planner, a list-maker, a scheduler, and someone who made a career of process improvement. I’ve happily sat through every plotting workshop and read dozens of plotting books, trying to figure out how to streamline my process.

But after more than a decade of looking for a system that works for me, I finally realized I already had one. I used it when I wrote my first three manuscripts, before I knew anything about writing, I used it for my six published books, and I’m using it on my current manuscript.

It’s my natural process, and it’s messy and slow and challenging and exciting and adventurous, and nothing like the “best practices” and “shoulds” that regularly get hammered into our brains.

Think about some of those “rules of writing” that everyone knows you have to follow. Think especially of those that make you feel guilty or stupid or never seem to work for you. How many times have you been made to feel lazy because you don’t want to plot?

This isn’t a discipline or focus issue. It’s a difference in process.

There Are Many Ways to Plot

With the exception of Steven James’s Story Trumps Structure, I know of very few books that are explicitly about writing without figuring out the story in advance. Everyone seems to have a slightly different method to teach, but since they’re all plotters, it can feel like you have to be too. I promise, you don’t.

The fact that there are so many plotting systems seems to prove that everyone is wired differently and that there’s no One Right Way.

Is plotting easier? Maybe.

If you’re a plotter.

I’m not here to tell you not to plot. I’m just here to tell you that it’s okay if you don’t.

In fact, I’d argue that pantsers (a.k.a. seat-of-the-pants/discovery/into-the-mist writers) do plot. But instead of creating an 80-page outline, we get even more detailed and write an entire first draft in order to work out the story.

Is Plotting Really Faster?

There’s this idea that writing is like taking a trip. You start with a destination in mind, you calculate that 300 miles a day will get you there in 3 days, you plan out your route on a map, and follow it for 900 miles. Done.

I love the metaphor, but for it to work for me, it’d have to be more like this:

• General destination: somewhere in New England.
• Route: I’ll follow the designated roads that get me closer to the east coast, but I’ll choose which direction to go when I reach a junction.
• Obstacles: Along the way I will likely encounter heavy construction, some serendipitous meetups and unexpectedly beautiful detours, and probably a breakdown or two.
• Specific final destination: I’ll figure it out once I’ve made enough of the journey to know what I want.

To extend the metaphor, the more I try to follow a planned route, the longer the trip takes. It’s better if I just get on the road and start driving east. (It would give me hives to actually travel this way.)

People will tell you that outlining a book makes it faster. And for a lot of people it does. Because that’s how their brain works. Yay! For someone like me, plotting only gets in the way of my process and actually slows me down. I’ve tested it. And I’m not alone.

If you’re at all curious why plotting is great for some and not others, I highly recommend Dear Writer, Are You Intuitive (or really anything that series) by Becca Syme and Susan Bischoff.

Craft Still Matters

I consider plotting to be separate from good writing craft. There are plenty of elements that will need to be in your manuscript to make it good, but that’s not dependent on how you come up with the story.

What Does Pantsing Look Like?

Just as there are many ways to plot, there are many ways not to. For example:

• According to Dean Koontz’s website, he obsessively revises as he writes, sometimes taking a ten-hour day to get only 1/3 of a finished page.
• I have to be writing to get ideas for what comes next. I also need time to ponder and revisit what I’ve written.
• Some people use character sketches and interviews to get to know their characters. Others put them in situations and write what happens.
• You might use story structure as a guide for what type of scene comes next even if you don’t know what will happen. Some writers do this instinctively because we’re so steeped in structure via reading and watching movies that we subconsciously pick up the patterns. Others need to learn the structure concepts explicitly before they can use them as guide posts.
• Some writers don’t worry about structure at all. :gasp:
• In a recent workshop I did for pantsers, participants shared their own writing processes, and there was as much variety in how not to plot as there are books on plotting.

If you don’t plot, you are not alone.

How Do You Determine Your Process?

If you’re fairly new to writing, you might be wondering how to figure out where you fall on the plotting/pantsing spectrum.

Here are some things to ask yourself to help you figure it out:

• What do you do instinctively? How did you write before you learned “the rules?”
• Try different methods that appeal to you and see what happens. Maybe you are a plotter who’s been pantsing your way through because you don’t know anything about story structure or beats. That’s cool. We still like you.
• Does plotting actually make you faster, or does it just add another step to the process before you grope your way through a manuscript? Maybe you’re somewhere in the middle, and you feel safer when you have a light sketch of what you think will happen, but leave yourself room for the serendipitous changes that can happen once you dig into the story.
• What do you need to know, if anything, in order to move forward? More general info on a topic, more specifics, to know the characters better, to understand villain, basic premise, story structure? Just the spark?
• What kind of environment works best for you? A schedule, no schedule, a new place to sit, the same chair every time, burning palo santo, music, crowds, silence?
• Do you work better if you revise as you go, or get the whole story out and revise when you’re done?
• Do you write in linear order, or more like Anne Lamott of Bird by Bird, who writes a bunch of scenes and figures out how to stitch them together later?
• Do you like to brainstorm your story with other writers, or does getting ideas from them actually confuse or stifle your creativity?

Why Knowing Your Process Matters

Why does it matter if you figure out your process, especially when it could change over time or with each project?

Because when you stop fighting yourself and worrying about what you “should” be doing, you’ll enjoy the writing more. And it may even make you faster.

Writers find enough reasons to beat themselves up. Don’t add your method to the list.

Pantsers Are in Good Company

In case you needed more assurance, there are plenty of famous and arguably successful authors who don’t plot. You might recognize a few of these:

• Stephen King
• Margaret Atwood
• Meg Cabot
• Susan Elizabeth Phillips
• David Morrell
• Mark Twain
• Isaac Asimov
• Neil Gaiman

So, take all the workshops, read all the books, adopt what resonates, but stop fighting your own process. Plotting your book in advance is not the only way to write. In fact, if you’re a pantser, trying to plot might be eating up precious time that could be spent writing, and causing you unnecessary stress.

Here’s what I wish someone had told me years ago: You are not doing it wrong. There’s no right way to write, only your way.

What’s your writing process like? Are there any “rules of writing” that have never worked for you?