Plotter or Pantser?
Discussion and a Prompt
Plotter, Pantser, or Somewhere in Between
You’ve likely heard the terms “plotter” and “pantser” in your writing communities. But in case you haven’t: a so-called plotter is someone who plans (or plots), sometimes meticulously, before they write. For example, if they’re writing a novel, they likely know what’s going to happen in each chapter. A pantser, on the other hand, is a writer who is essentially flying by the seat of their pants (hence the name). The pantser may (or may not) have a general idea of their overall project before they start.
I want to emphasize that there is no one right way to write. It’s fine to be a plotter, pantser, or anywhere in between. No judgement here!
My “Just Start Writing” Method
I’m a pantser through and through and always have been, even in school when teachers required us to make outlines before we wrote our essays. I would comply for the assignment but rarely used the outlines as intended; I preferred to just start writing because even though it was likely more work, this “just start writing” method helped me understand better what I wanted to say in a way that outlines didn’t. That’s just the way my brain works. But (thankfully) not everybody’s brain works the same!
For me, this “just start writing” method works well for short prose and poetry and may be why I’m a drawn to the short and very short forms. Admittedly, though, it was much less effective when I was a kid trying to write a novel with literally no idea of what I was doing. I’d start writing, get forty or fifty pages in, and then get stuck. How do I get myself out of this?! I still have a number of lengthy beginnings to “novels” in my filing cabinet (many of which were handwritten, back before computers were ubiquitous).
If you’re a so-called pantser, you may be a very messy writer; I certainly am! I would describe some of my early drafts of anything I write—even (or maybe especially) blog-type posts like this one—as chaotic, with starts and stops and repetitive information and bullet points and website links, etc., all of which I edit in, out, or around in later drafts. In fact, when I sat down at my computer to write this particular piece, I didn’t really know what I was going to say. I had a loose idea in my head, but that was about it.
It was much the same when I was a preteen/teenager, when my specific goal was to be a murder mystery writer like Agatha Christie, whose books I read obsessively in junior high. I wanted to write mystery novels, but I had no idea what to do about plot, how to plant clues, or even what character to kill off, so these “novels” naturally fizzled out fairly quickly.
I also seemed to have the mistaken belief that writers only wrote novels; I never really even considered writing short stories until my late teens/early twenties. In fact, confined by length and assignment instructions, I once tried to fit a whole novel into a story; it ended up as a thirty-page (single-spaced, written in MacWrite on an ‘80s-era Macintosh) murder-mystery story, which I submitted as a final project in my eighth-grade English class. My English teacher was fresh out of college, and if I had to guess, I’d bet he changed the final-project guidelines the following year! He had graded and returned everybody else’s projects (only a handful of which were short stories) and told me he was still working on mine. I remember him kind of groan-whining, “It’s SO long.” I can only imagine how tedious it was to read!
The Problem of Plot
The “problem” of plot followed me out of my murder-mystery phase and into early adulthood, when I tried short fiction but struggled, always feeling like something big had to happen in the prose, that there had to be a problem to be solved. Many of these problem-solution “plots” in my stories felt forced, and I honestly didn’t much enjoy writing them.
This was before I understood that “plot” in stories didn’t have to refer to a problem to solve. That conflict and tension in a story could be internal. This may well be why I fell head over heels for flash and microfiction. So much can occur in such a small amount of space. And the writer doesn’t have to be explicit about it; so much happens off the page. Plot, as it were, is often just implied. (My kind of writing—just let the reader figure out what my plot is!)
I’ve been blathering on about plot, but now I actually want to dispense with the term because it’s vague and means different things to different people, and, quite frankly, I just don’t like it. People sometimes use terms like “story,” “story arc,” and “plot” interchangeably, yet E. M. Forster famously pointed out a distinction between “story” and “plot.” If you click on that link, you may find yourself in a rabbit hole and will perhaps see why all these terms can be so confusing, especially to newer writers. As a fifteen-year-old, if someone had tried to explain to me the difference between “plot” and “story” in that way, my eyes would have glazed over and I would have said, “Whatever. Can I just write now?” (It’s actually still my reaction.)
Some people also insist that stories must have a beginning, middle, and end, but what does that actually mean in practice?
In Felicia Rose Chavez’s book The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop, she notes that terminology should be defined and agreed upon within a workshop context. That is to say, I couldn’t just throw the term “plot” around without everybody in the workshop having a mutual understanding of how the term was being used. Common sense? Maybe, but also a revelation (for me).
I’ve had interactions with writers who apologize and say, “I don’t know the right terminology,” often adding “I’m not really a writer.” But knowing the terminology doesn’t make you a writer; writing does. Craft is not about terminology. This may be an unpopular opinion, but I believe you can understand what you’re doing, sometimes intuitively, and always by studying others’ writing, without knowing all the lingo for it. And if you still doubt that you’re a writer, check out this blog post I wrote a few years ago.
Moments, Ideas, and Memories
It was the feeling that I couldn’t master “story,” “story arc,” and/or “plot” that steered me toward poetry for a number of years. Poetry allowed me to write about a moment or an idea; in that way, it felt more natural.
But guess what! You can do that in fiction, too!
The ideas for my stories often come from small “nuggets” of inspiration: a phrase, a childhood memory, or an overheard conversation. Once I let go of the idea of “plot” as problem-solution and started writing fiction as freely as I did poetry, I became much more prolific and comfortable in my writing voice. Do my stories contain “plot”? Do they have “arcs”? Um, maybe…? I guess it depends on the definition.
A fellow writer once told me quite sternly that one of my stories wasn’t a story because it had no arc; they said, “Just fix that and you’ll have a good story!” I didn’t “fix” it, and the story, one of my favorites, was eventually published. Just goes to show.
If I don’t know if my own work has a plot or a story arc, what does that say about me as a writer (and editor)? Well, I think it means that when I look at my own work, as well as when I provide feedback on others’, I’m less concerned with convention and specific terminology and more concerned with how I’m engaging with a piece, from both an intuitive standpoint and a craft standpoint. Because writing craft is much more complex than simply following conventions or being able to put a label on something. (But, yes, it can be helpful to know—or be familiar with—certain terminology.)
Just Write
If “plot” is holding you back from writing, much like it did for me for so many years, I urge you to not think about it but just write instead. You may surprise yourself.
As an example, my one-sentence story “The Falling Game” was recently published at Complete Sentence Lit, a journal that publishes one-sentence prose. This story was sparked by the memory of a childhood game my best friend and I used to play when we rode in the car (in the early ‘80s when kids rode “loose” (no car seats and no seatbelts)). Is there a plot? A story arc? You tell me.
In fact, a lot of my story ideas come from childhood memories! I almost feel like it’s cheating in a way, because the “story” already exists (in the form of memory). It’s common for me to then add some supernatural elements to the story to cement it as fiction. Otherwise, sometimes the memory becomes too real for me and I find that I’m writing nonfiction instead, which is generally not my intent (though occasionally I do do it purposely!).
Prompt
Even if you’re a so-called “plotter,” I challenge you to try writing without planning. Think of something you said or did as a kid that now seems silly, funny, or even dangerous. Don’t think, just write.
Start with setting the scene (where were you when you said or did this thing) and see where it leads. Aim for 500-1000 words.
Optional: Write in second person (“you”).
Optional: Add at least one aspect of magical realism to your prose.