Pantsing or Plotting?
Writing with the aim of publishing opens a minefield of options and complications.
My Brainland News - Pantsing or Planning
How people write differs significantly; like with any creative pursuit, there is nothing right or wrong, just individual preferences.
There are basically two main writing styles, and after that, everything is mixed up.
What kind of writer are you? – Are you ‘pantsing’ or ‘plotting’ and structured?
Let’s have a look at pantsing. – For starters, what is pantsing?
Pantsing means “Writing by the seats of your pants”, or the original metaphor, “Fly by the seat of your pants.”
Actually, most writers probably start writing in the pantsing style; we all did it at school when we had to write a short story or an essay. – You get a headline delivered, and then, without much time on hand, you start writing what you know, what comes naturally to you. – The only structure or concept you would use is to write an intro, then write the high point of your story, finally sum it up, and hopefully, you have an excellent plausible resolution or happy ending.
Anyone who can do that with a novel, writing without pre-planning and letting the story develop itself, obviously has to be highly gifted.
I can honestly say right here I am not that gifted person, and we probably can agree that there is only a minority of talented people who can pull that off.
However, I often start writing like that, a bit like writing diarrhoea, but sooner or later, I run out of steam and start plotting.
The opposite of pantsing is plotting or planning. I think most writers are somewhere in between. It is often easier to start writing as a pantser, which can establish your primary story, and once it becomes complex, with lots of new characters, plots, twists, and turns, planning and plotting slowly takes over.
My suspicion is the longer the novel, as more planning.
However, my hat off to famous pantsers, including Stephen King, Margaret Atwood, Pierce Brown, James Joyce, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemmingway, Raymond Chandler, Virginia Woolf and many more.
Who are the famous plotters? Definitely J.K. Rowling, John Grisham, E.L. Stein and heaps more …
My last book was written in the pantsing style; it came naturally and was chronological, with some back-stories thrown in when needed, not planned.
I just started to write a new book, and it will be fiction, something I have not done before. Once again, I started pantsing. I still have no idea where the story will end, but in my head, I have ideas for different sections of the book. Already, I am combining pantsing and planning. My planning for the moment is restricted to arranging the different sections, but the individual parts are written in pantsing style.
Once I have written some parts, I usually will have developed more ideas and can write more. In other words, as long as I trust my brain and intuition, I can keep writing, and once it is all written, I can start revising, cleaning up or connecting.
Stay posted, keep me company, and let’s find out together what my main character, Blake Newcome, a fictional inquisitive journalist, will be up to.
Cheers, Dieter Luske – Writer
PS: Check out my last two books, “It Happened in the Seventies” and “Chaos in Brainland” - both on Amazon