Being a Panster to the Nth Degree

[intim8]

In the same way I envy people like my wife who is the definition of order to my chaos in every way and writers who can spend time on an outline and stick to it. I can't do that just as others can't simply wing it.

I don't envy them, because even if I could do it, I would find it interminably boring. But I'm not going to try to talk anybody out of what is working for them, so long as it doesn't require eating babies or kicking puppies.

 

[NoTalentHack]

I started out planning to write a fairly simple take on the Loving Wives Hall Pass trope, the "you gave me this hall pass years ago, and now I plan to use it,cue the angst" story seed. My initial tweak was just, "hey, what if, instead of the wife saying 'I'm going to use this,' she instead says, 'I already used it,' because she wanted to soften the blow?" Maybe 10K words.

What it's instead become is a (probably) 35K word story about the way two people view romantic gestures, letter vs. spirit of the law, what 'just sex' means in emotional terms, forgiveness for self vs. others and how the latter can be easier/more obvious, projection of desires, and, ah, cuckqueaning. Because Literotica. Plus a liberal sprinkling of movie and nerd references, which always goes over SO well with the he-man contingent.

 

[NoTalentHack]

I've tried plotting. Once everything is in place as an idea, I lose interest.

This is my problem, too. "Welp, there's the story. Why write it?"

 

[Erozetta]

This is my problem, too. "Welp, there's the story. Why write it?"

Exactly.

I like learning what happens as I go. I get to read and write at the same time, uncover the story just like a reader would. I love that.


(Edit: unvover to uncover. I hate typing on my phone.)

 

[AwkwardlySet]

As @intim8 pointed out, I think we are overly presenting things as if every one of us is either or. Being a pantser or a plotter isn't a binary choice - each and every one of us is both, it's just a question of to what degree. I tried to percentilize (that's totally a word) myself. I might be off in the sense that I am a bit more of a pantser than I think but I don't think I am off by much. Each of you pantsers plans too, it's just a question of how much.

 

[intim8]

This is my problem, too. "Welp, there's the story. Why write it?"

I'm a little bit spectrum-ey, and one way that manifests is that once something (a project, a task, whatever) is planned thoroughly enough, my brain says "it's done." Like actually executing it is just a trivial detail.

I have no better luck with to-do lists than I do with planning stories.

un[c]over the story just like a reader would. I love that.

Yep. I can't wait to see what happens next.

 

[intim8]

Each of you pantsers plans too, it's just a question of how much.

That's an interesting point that I have considered. I can tell you that some of the stories I've published here and elsewhere are the zeroth draft as it came out, with just proofreading and minor sentence and maybe paragraph level editing. Others, there is some planning involved, but after the initial pantsing. I figure out what structure emerged and change it as needed, sometimes adding or deleting additional scenes, sometimes reordering them. And often that means fleshing out the characters that have emerged, sometimes even changing them completely.

But where it gets more murky is the "soft" planning that, as you say, often happens in that hypnogogic/hypnopompic state just before or after sleep. Yeah, sometimes I plan in those, in a loose way. I imagine a whole scene, or I discover that in my sleep, I figured out the ending and now steer the remainder of the story that way.

It is a soft boundary, but if I had to percentalize it, I'd call it about 95% pantsing for me. Though on longer stuff, the final result might be closer to 70/30 or even 60/40. Does pantsing a whole new draft, but this time using what was learned - what emerged - the first time count as planning?

It probably doesn't need to be defined so precisely. The essential difference is where each writer figures out the overall structure, story, and theme. Some have it before they write a word, some don't get it until after thousands of words. On that novel I mentioned, I have it now, after 120K of pantsing. Now I'm facing a complete rewrite, because the pantsed version, while productive in that it brought out the theme, is boring as fuck.

I have referred to pantsing as just overly wordy outlining.

 

[StillStunned]

If I admit to doing any plotting, it's usually after the fact. As I'm writing, I'll let the story go where it needs to go, and if I like the direction I'll quite happily go back and change earlier bits and scenes. This is also where I add foreshadowing, or introduce any characters that I discover I need later on.

In The Countesses of Tannensdal, for example, I realised I needed a religious figure to help incite the peasants. The Bible-brandishing priest urging the mob on. So I rewrote the narrator's arrival in Tannensdal to include an affable Irish priest and gave him a reason for being there. Then I rewrote another scene to explain why he joins the antagonist and how his relationship with the narrator changes. In the end I think he added hugely to the story, and in fact it was his presence that determined how the story ended.

 

[Voboy]

Chaos is a ladder...

I envy pantsers. They’re incredibly productive, firing words from their keyboards like a Vulcan cannon. Some even turn a profit.

I envy them because they have fun, riding a creative flow without restrictions-- no need for planning or structure. More is more; excess is best. Unlike us, the unfortunate goldsmiths, who labor endlessly, polishing tiny diamonds with painstaking care.

But I also pity them. Much of what they produce is junk. Their writing swings wildly in quality, sometimes even within the same scene. Their outlines are shaky. Characters can feel flat, their actions inconsistent or senseless. Entire sections could vanish without anyone noticing. Worse, their pages are cluttered with irrelevant events and personal ramblings that add nothing to the story.

I envy modern artists. Some get rich by splattering paint on a canvas, while others manage to analyze those splashes with a straight face. I wish I could see more than just scribbles.

Chaos is a ladder; diamonds are eternal.

As if one method has to be better than the other.

People think and write in different ways. Fortunately, both ways can produce great results. Similarly, both ways can produce crap. I think denigrating one method or the other is silly.

 

[NoTalentHack]

For me, I usually have the story beats planned out in my head, but I'm also willing to ruthlessly cut them from the story or splice new ones in. Or re-order them. Or invert the original plan. Or... That's how I fight the "I know the story, why write it" obstacle; I tell myself that I don't know the story, and that's technically true. I just know what I intended, and that's usually enough.

Truthfully, it's probably why I haven't gotten all the way to a novel-length story yet. I think if I tried that approach, I'd end up either planning it out (removing the drive to write it) or pants it to the point where I drove myself nuts.

 

[StillStunned]

Truthfully, it's probably why I haven't gotten all the way to a novel-length story yet. I think if I tried that approach, I'd end up either planning it out (removing the drive to write it) or pants it to the point where I drove myself nuts.

Hur-hur, you said "pants and "nuts" in the same sentence. And "removing". Hur-hur, hur-hur.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

Ok, here's the essay that you can all skip over but I have been meaning to start a thread on this topic myself lately so here goes.

Pantsing vs plotting is just a way of getting the ideas down, nothing more. One method is not better than another but simply a matter of preference for each writer.

Pantsing vs plotting is also absolutely a spectrum and no one is 100% at one end or the other. Like someone else mentioned above, the type of story (especially the length of a story) will change how one writes it. I'm a plotter. For me, any story under 15k words (you know your standard one-shot) will be 85-90% plotted, but a 40k novella and up will be more like 65-80% plotted. Often I need to write a scene or two with the characters to get a better feel for their motives before I can shape the plot fully and if there's more plot I'll have to pants a few scenes to help me get there, but most of the time I struggle to flesh out a scene if I don't know where it's going or how it should get there.

No matter how much you pants it, even if you're never thinking more than one paragraph ahead, you're still planning something in some small way and technically that's plotting. On the other hand, no matter how rigid you plot out everything in a scene, the moment that you start fleshing those sentences out, to a degree you are pantsing. No one can escape this.

At writing's basic levels, pantsing is more fun. When the actual words are flowing from your fingertips, that is the energy, that is the high. Plotting can be fun (sometimes I have great fun daydreaming and brainstorming the ideas) but it's not the same as getting that sentence, that paragraph, that dialogue, that scene down onto the paper. It's the best.

What's really not fun is editing. Editing is a chore, but it is always necessary. Furthermore, the less that you plot, the more you will likely need to edit. When you open a story and start reading and the plot is good and the flow is good, you have no idea if it was plotted or pantsed, however, if a story is pantsed and poorly or not edited, it reads like a sloppy pants job. It's often super easy to tell. Chekhov is firing bullets in all directions. There are side scenes that go nowhere, unnecessary characters conveniently pop up out of the fog, stuff is elaborately introduced and never heard from again, recursive scenes drone on too long and generally the pace is bloated and erratic.

Once I realized that the writing experience is merely a means to creating a reading experience that lasts forever, I made a choice that I wanted to create the best reading experience that I could every time that I write. When you do this, editing becomes easier. It doesn't necessarily make it fun, but it does often deliver a great sense of satisfaction when you fix something, knowing that the reading experience just got better - which is the goal, to make the reading experience as good as it can be - forever.

I also know exactly what people mean about losing interest after outlining. I have done that. I have outlined an entire novel nearly scene for scene and have it sit in a file, untouched. I lost the fire for it, but I will say that if I feel that the story is good enough, nothing is going to stop me from getting back to it and writing it.

If you've read this far, we now come to the part where some folks might get butthurt. I can't really help people's perceptions. I just speak the truth. What I will say is that not everyone who claims to be a pantser is. If we were to poll writers on literotica (or amateur erotica writers in general) and ask them if they felt that they were a plotter or a pantser, you'd probably get a result of 75% pantser, 25% plotter, which is inaccurate. If we were to poll a more professional sample of writers it would probably be more like 60% plotter, I could be wrong. The discrepancy is that for every true pantser out there, there is at least one impostor - a lazy writer who only wants to do the fun part of the writing and wants nothing to do with the tedious part of plotting and has even less interest in ever editing anything, yet to justify themselves as a writer they just claim "oh, I'm a pantser," as an excuse to never have to put in the effort to up their game, and still pretend to be a serious writer while they indulgently putter around with words.

Now I'm not trying to put down anyone by saying that they are a bad writer because they are lazy. This is hobby writing after all and everyone is welcome. What I mean by my stance - and it is tricky to explain - is that there are many writers who aren't nearly as good as they think they are because they write the same old story over and over, a formula that they can churn out with little effort, and get their Red Hs. I've been rudely told that "you don't have any Red Hs and I have quite a few so it's obvious who the better writer is." I don't care who the better writer is, but I read one of his stories (his latest at the time) and it had multiple issues and wasn't anywhere near as good as he thought it was. It was very lazy writing and the story was boring. Furthermore, because he thinks it's so good, the chances of improving his skills are slim.

I think it does a real disservice to all of us who are interested to know what the differences between a pantser and a plotter really are. I would not carelessly lump any of these so-called pantsers in with someone like lc68 who is a genuine pantser. Not only does he know that he is a pantser, he knows why, since his efforts to plot have always been thwarted by his chaotic mind, therefore the pants method indeed gets him better results. The lazy writers call themselves pantsers but they can't really know that they're pantsers since most of them have likely never put in the effort to try to seriously plot anything (one or two feeble attempts doesn't count). The pants label just enables their lazy habits to continue and avoid plotting and editing. Again, it's hobby writing so there's nothing wrong with that, but these writers stuck in these habits will never come to know that they are actually creating a reading experience. It will only ever be about the writing experience with little to no regard for the results for them and so will always have difficulty connecting with readers on anything more than the basest level and will never truly aim high. But don't you dare try to tell them that they're not as good as they think they are. They'll just smear you as an arrogant pedant. Well if me getting smeared is the price for truth that helps out even one writer out there, I'm not afraid of any labels.

Once one starts to realize that the results of the work is the reading experience, one can then focus on and appreciate the results of what they are doing at least in equal amounts to the simple indulgent personal high of the writing experience, and then more people will start caring about their work on more than just the basest level.

I call myself a plotter, not because I think that it's a better way or that I want to be seen as one. I do not care how I come up with ideas and will take good ones any way that I can. I just tend to get better results when I plot, and I care about the results more than I care about my personal writing experience (and I care deeply about my experience).

And finally, as I said in another thread recently, I don't think that anyone intends to be a short-sighted indulgent writer. They just get caught up in the joyous high of the writing experience and genuinely want to share that high. ("I wrote something really cool! You gotta read this so you can feel as good as I do!") But the writing experience can't be shared. One can only deliver a reading experience. Once you realize that creating a reading experience is essentially all that you can do, you begin to find a zen to the craft.

 

[Katie_Mae]

I have referred to pantsing as just overly wordy outlining.

In a similar vein, I've commented before that the difference between pantsters and plotters is the former call their outline their "first draft."

 

[pink_silk_glove]

In a similar vein, I've commented before that the difference between pantsters and plotters is the former call their outline their "first draft."

Indeed, a good writer (no matter their technique) is never too lazy to revise and edit.

 

[burgwad]

Indeed, a good writer (no matter their technique) is never too lazy to revise and edit.

I like to think of each subsequent pass as putting additional pants on over the pants I already had on.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

I like to think of each subsequent pass as putting additional pants on over the pants I already had on.

However, if you were in England and said "My writing is pants," ...

 

[MelissaBaby]

When I first read people here discussing being pantsers and plotters, I figured I was a plotter, largely because my first series was so closely based on my own experiences that I knew the story in its entirety before I wrote the first word. And my process makes me largely what most people think of as a plotter. But I've come to figure it is a phony binary.

I've appreciated the posts in this thread. I'm grateful to learn how other people's processes work. If your method gets you to a result that satisfies you, then it's a good method.

I compare my own method to a journey. I know where I am starting from, I know the final destination and I have a route planned, with important stops predetermined along the way. By the general definition, as I understand it, that makes me a plotter. But I don't know every stop on the route, I am open to side trips, I expect detours and road blocks. So, there is an element of pantsing in my process.

And you know what? I have great fun with my writing.

 

[MostHated]

However, despite writing like no one's reading, I do always have an idea where it should go, I just don't lock myself in and let myself freestyle within the "This is what I'd like it to be."

This happens to me, I have an idea, and write some notes but it's always very light on details. I feel like I could improve if I actually sat down and thought 'This is the idea for the story in my head, now write a proper outline, get details about the characters, and then the story will reveal itself.

Okay, how do I write a story without knowing its story?

I'm curious, do you have the start and the end to the story worked out in your head before you start writing? I'll have a basic idea for a story, but not always a start or end. When you describe it the way you have above, I feel similar, sometimes I'll be partially through a story and I know that I don't have the next chapter worked out so I type and hope for the best. However, I usually end up going back and deleting all of that and instead wait for inspiration or just listen to the ideas that seem to float into my head a few minutes before falling asleep at night. This then adds the complexity of hatching another story/stories idea and feeling driven to start writing that one as well, which ends up with me having too many irons in the fire at a given time.

I began safe. A scene which introduces the brother, and does drop some foreshadowing that something is off about the small town their parents grew up in and he and his sister are visiting for the first time. I drop a twilight (or more like taboo) zone text from the mayor that goes to everyone in the town and describes the upcoming festival and the rules. Now I'm backing myself into the corner with no way out in my mind, but fuck it, as Alfred E Nueman would say "What, me worry?"

Question: Have you ever started a story that you've ultimately given up on?

 

[Rob_Royale]

I'm sort of giving the whole pantser idea a shot with my current WIP. We'll see, but it's hard to not think about it in my off time, which I usually use to plan the story.

 

[lovecraft68]

This happens to me, I have an idea, and write some notes but it's always very light on details. I feel like I could improve if I actually sat down and thought 'This is the idea for the story in my head, now write a proper outline, get details about the characters, and then the story will reveal itself.



I'm curious, do you have the start and the end to the story worked out in your head before you start writing? I'll have a basic idea for a story, but not always a start or end. When you describe it the way you have above, I feel similar, sometimes I'll be partially through a story and I know that I don't have the next chapter worked out so I type and hope for the best. However, I usually end up going back and deleting all of that and instead wait for inspiration or just listen to the ideas that seem to float into my head a few minutes before falling asleep at night. This then adds the complexity of hatching another story/stories idea and feeling driven to start writing that one as well, which ends up with me having too many irons in the fire at a given time.


Question: Have you ever started a story that you've ultimately given up on?

I do have the beginning and an end mind. For this one it was more just having "this is how it ends" because I could have started in a variety of ways.

The only story I've given up on-other than a five part series I abandoned because of life drama, I talk about that in a thread called writer redemption-the only thing I've given up on-for now is the fourth novel in an erotic horror series, and that's part of writing myself into a corner, and part my wife's health issues making that type focus difficult. Everything else I've always managed to fnish.

 

[yowser]

What's really not fun is editing. Editing is a chore, but it is always necessary. Furthermore, the less that you plot, the more you will likely need to edit. When you open a story and start reading and the plot is good and the flow is good, you have no idea if it was plotted or pantsed, however, if a story is pantsed and poorly or not edited, it reads like a sloppy pants job. It's often super easy to tell. Chekhov is firing bullets in all directions. There are side scenes that go nowhere, unnecessary characters conveniently pop up out of the fog, stuff is elaborately introduced and never heard from again, recursive scenes drone on too long and generally the pace is bloated and erratic.

I like your formulation of the whole writer/reader relationship as creating a 'reader experience.' Not a bad way to proceed.

I may be in the minority here. My own favorite part of writing is the editing. I am usually a bit relieved when the story is about 60-80 percent done, the major parts are out there, there is a first draft that is pretty well complete, I'm reasonably happy with the story arc and the characters.

Then I print the thing out and go to work. All the flaws are there to read. A lot of loose bolts that need to be snugged down. A paragraph here or there is redundant or needs tightening. Surely there is a better word than what I chose to describe something? The draft is in shreds in no time, pen markings all over the page. Final piece usually ends up shorter than my draft, even if I have added parts. It is only in that 'editing phase' that I end up with an 'ideal' (Platonic?) story and my mind is happy.

And then of course, there is the inevitable gap between mental conception and execution. The final product is always not as sweet as what I 'see' in my mind. The perfect chord progression, an exquisite description, just the right way to reveal a character all have proven just-out-of-reach elusive.

But at some point, the thing has to get out there, since the tinkerings become second guessing and whatever is tweaked is no better than what was there originally. And off the offspring go into the world, all warted up and drooling and imperfect.

But I love that 'almost there, could be perfect' phase, when I can use my sandpaper to make it as good as it will get.

 

[StillStunned]

Call me a German armoured division, because I just pantsed the pants off a new story. Mostly I at least have an idea of where it's going and/or some of the steps along the way. This time was pure improv.

When I began, all I had in my head was one idea. I started writing, and the story kept changing with every scene. Even right at the end, I was surprised by the twist it took and where the characters ended up.

And you know what? I'm really happy with how it turned out.