Phil W. Bayles

Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love Pantsing

“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.”

E.L. Doctorow

Generally speaking, there are two types of writers: plotters and pantsers.

I’ve always considered myself a plotter; before I start a story — even a short story — I write out all the key plot points and figure out how to string them together. I’m not alone in this: John Grisham is a prodigious plotter, as was Agatha Christie. Pantsers, on the other hand, simply start writing and see where the words take them. In other words, they fly by the seat of their pants (hence the name). The most famous pantser of all might be Stephen King, who once said “plot is the last refuge of bad writers.” Ouch, Stephen.

Until recently I never thought that I could be a pantser. The idea of just sitting down at a keyboard or holding pen over paper and waiting for inspiration seemed ludicrous; like holding my hands out over the ocean and expecting a fish to leap into my outstretched fingers. But then a funny thing happened to me recently when I was working through a tricky scene of my novel: the characters started misbehaving.

I thought I knew how the scene would go: the protagonist would call up the bad guys and goad them into setting the time and place for the final climactic showdown. It was going to be like that one scene from Taken, if Liam Neeson had had crippling insecurity and no upper body strength.

Instead, the bad guys just said “No, thanks” and hung up the phone.

It was disconcerting, to say the least. I’ve known which direction this story’s been heading in for years. I had written a synopsis, broken it down into scenes, and even used that old screenwriting classic Save The Cat! as a yardstick to make sure the story had all the right elements. I’d assumed all that was left was to put some flesh on the bones, with dialogue and descriptions and details about the world. Instead, the more human my characters became, the more they rebelled. The more I tried to push them down the path I had set out, the more they pulled away.

When this first happened, I went through a long, dark teatime of the soul. Had I missed some massive hole in the centre of my plot? Had my characters not been as well-conceived as I imagined? Was I, in fact, a bad writer? For a day or two I felt like giving up. I wanted to throw my notebook in the bin, delete the files off my hard drive and go back to square one.

Then a voice in my head said: “Don’t stand there waiting for them to come back. Follow them. See where they go.” So I did. I watched from a respectful difference as they all sat around asking each other what the hell they were going to do. Eventually one of them had an epiphany, and set a new plan into motion — one that, coincidentally, had as its end result the exact same climax I’d been trying to build towards. I realised with a jolt that I was doing something I never thought myself capable of: I was pantsing.

And once you start pantsing, it’s very hard to stop.  When I first started writing this blog post, my plan was to begin with my own story about my characters misbehaving  and then segue into the explanation about plotting vs pantsing. But somewhere along the way, I realised that the whole thing would make so much more sense if I flipped them around. So I threw out my plans.

Of course, like sex and gender and basically every other binary out there, plotter vs pantser is not as cut-and-dry as it seems. Even if they don’t know exactly where a story is going to go, most pantsers are at least going to follow the basic conventions of story structure (unless they’re trying to do something really experimental. And the most meticulous plotters still have to do the unexpected sometimes; even if I know a scene needs to revolve around a conversation, I don’t know every single word the characters are going to share ahead of time. I write the first line of dialogue, and then figure out what the other character would say next.

This isn’t meant to be a putdown of the practice of plotting. I wouldn’t have gotten as far as I have with my writing without planning a route first. But if you’re a fellow plotter out there who’s similarly afraid of straying off the beaten path, I hope this encourages you to try embracing the unknown, even in small ways. It might just be the thing you need to make progress.

After all, a comfort blanket can feel like a straitjacket if you wrap yourself too tightly inside it.