Alexandra Seidel, together with her alter ego Alexa Piper, runs this blog. You can find out more in the About section.
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Pantsing, Or, Why You Don’t Need an Outline
Writing, at its heart, is a craft. As with every craft it involves creativity and the desire to improve one’s work constantly, through practice, but also through learning from masters or at least those further along in their pursuit of masterhood.
When you look for advice on writing, one thing you will stumble across is the outline. An outline is a tool to let you know where your story is going before you write it, just like a map on which you have marked your way before a hike or road trip. Outlining is a tool, and certainly a useful one. Unless you are a pantser.
Generally speaking, writers fall into two categories, outliners and discovery writers or more colloquially, plotters and pantser (who write by the seat of their pants.) A natural outliner will do well with the advice to outline, even if they might adjust the level of detail to their own needs. They might fall in love with character sheets that tell them all kinds of things about the people populating their world, they will spend hours designing geography and religion. However, what works so well for one type of writer might not work at all for another.
When I first started researching writing tools, I came across outlining of course, followed by character sheets and whole questionnaires that would help detail one’s fictional world. I tried some of it. I discovered that it never really worked out for me the way it did for others, that even an outline written out following a neatly numbered structure would produce a different story at the end of it, and writing that story while trying to follow that outline would always feel uncomfortable, somehow just wrong. Also, the best things I ever wrote were ideas that just popped up in my head and needed to be written as they unfolded, even if I myself had no idea whatsoever where they were going.
Writing a story in one session, or just a scene in one session, without knowing where it’s going is one of the things I love most about writing. It’s what makes me come back to the desk, to my computer, and make the words. The more I love a story, the more curious I am about it, and the more I need to write it because writing it is the only way for me to find out how it ends. This, to me, is discovery writing, and apart from allowing yourself to just let the words come, I’ve seen very little advice for discovery writers. I’d like to share a few things with you that I have learned. Perhaps this will save you from a few rounds of trial and error.
- Try everything. If you are just starting out, do try outlining and taking notes about the details of your world. It will be easy to see if this works for you or not, and either case, it’s a good exercise.
- Read, and read critically. Writing demands some kind of structure, at least if you want a reader to be able to follow it. Structure is one of the things that can be very difficult for pantsers, so having it internalized will help, and you can only do that by understanding that narratives do have a structure. And to see it, you need to analyze writing. I would recommend Shakespeare (or other dramas; but why would you, if you can read the Bard?) to learn the five act structure and understand the goals it wishes to achieve, but also movies (Save the Cat is a good resource), short stories, myths, fairy tales, and poems.
- Be aware of your weaknesses. It takes me a paragraph or two to get into the story. That’s okay. I write those paragraphs, and then I go back and either delete or move them. I sometimes need to add details as well, because they only come up at the end of a story. Depending on what it is I’m writing, I keep a list in a separate document as soon as I add a detail that should be present earlier in the story (this could be a character that started out as a side character but later gets named and does more to move the story forward.) Find the things that you tend to forget, to overdo, to not to enough, and when you revise, look for them specifically.
- Trust reader feedback. Especially as a pantser, you want honest reader feedback so you can figure out what those weaknesses are. You’ll likely not see where things are missing or don’t make sense, but readers will. Other writers are great beta readers for discovery writers, because a writer will have an easier time figuring out that your issue is the lack of character arc when reader feedback might just be that the story is boring.
- Finish. Let me be clear, pantsing is not an excuse for getting stuck and giving up on a story. The most important skill you can ever acquire is to finish what you started writing. You might have to force yourself, it might not be fun the first few times, but only if you get to The End and know you can get there consistently will you be able to progress as a writer.
This is the advice I can give all you pantsters out there, and I’ll add the disclaimer that all of this is based on my experience and on the skillset I have today. I might change my opinion on some of these things or all, and I might have to adjust them at a later point. I encourage you to do the same. Except of course the last one; you always want to get to
The End.
