I want to say a thing here. It might sound like a harsh thing but, really, it isn’t. It’s just a bit of common sense that we all know about ourselves, but sometimes are loathed to admit. Ready? You sure? I’m just going to say it.
If you’re reading this – and I include myself in that group, for I too am reading these words as I write – you are almost certainly not a prodigiously talented writer
I mean it. The odds on are so astronomical that I can say, with the reasonable expectation that I’ll never be proven wrong, that I am 100% sure that you aren’t a better writer than Stephen King. Or Kurt Vonnegut. Or Cormack McCarthy. Or whoever else you want to nominate as your favourite textual prodigy. It’s no insult to all of us to say that we’ll never be those guys. We could sell forty novels apiece – one hundred novels apiece – and have not a one of them be considered on a level like that. Some people come out of the womb screaming and kicking, others come out screaming and kicking ass.
Ladies and gents, we did the former.
What the hell has this got to do with Pantsing? For that matter, what the hell IS PANTSING??
Sorry. I always forget to define my terms.
That’s one of the reasons why I don’t ‘Pants’, but I digress.
When I say ‘pantsing’, I’m not talking about the act of pulling someone’s pants down. That’s a cruel and hilarious thing you do to people during an argument when you can’t think of a witty thing to say.
For the purpose of this blog I’m talking about the act of writing your manuscript without an outline to guide you. Literally, sitting down to write without a clue as to what comes next. Maybe you have a vague idea of where you want to go, but getting there? That’s an adventure, man. That’s where the creativity kicks in and the fingers do the rest. The term comes from the idiom ‘flying by the seat of your pants’. You don’t need no stinkin’ forethought to get your ideas across. They’re all up there, waiting to be put on a page, and any attempt to try and capture the gist of them in a simplified, overall way will utterly destroy those ideas.
Perhaps the best way for me to put this will be to list a couple of common phrases I’ve heard to justify and promote Pantsing:
I don’t outline because it limits my creativity. I don’t want to be locked in to one narrative strain that has to go a certain way with no room for expansion or, if the fancy takes me, an entirely different plot to the original! I’d never put so severe a handbrake on myself as an outline. That’s like saying you’re going on a holiday but staying on the train the whole time
I like to begin writing and let my characters take over. They’re kind of like real people in my head, you know, and I just give voice to them. What they do is up to them, and I can’t wait to see where they take me! Also, I’m making dinner for them later. T-bones. Hope they’re hungry
I know what I want to say already. Outlining would simply be a waste of time. I’ve got this thing planned out scene by scene in my head. What difference does it make if it’s written down? Spare me your trivialities
Did you notice how I took a kind of cynical tone with all of those examples? There’s a reason for that.
They’re all bullshit
1 – Outlining Limits My Creativity
I hear this one so, so much
Some people seem to be operating under the delusion that writing an outline is somehow different from writing literally anything else. As far as I can tell, they imagine that once they write ‘The End’ at the end of their outline, there is absolutely no opportunity to go back and alter it in any way. The document locks. Their administrator privileges are set to ‘Read Only’ forever. Any hand written versions are despatched to that facility in Indiana Jones and hidden away in a warehouse so big that it’ll never be found again
I feel orders of magnitude stupider just typing this, but that's not true at all! Your outline is as amorphos as your imagination, and just as editable as any manuscript. Why on earth does having it prevent your imagination from changing the arc of your story on the slightest of whims? If anything, it's going to be far easier to alter an outline than it is a manuscript. Outlines can be chopped, changed and edited with little to no effort and -- this is important -- without sapping your excitement for the project altogether
Momentum is a fickle thing. I understand how it happens to us changeable, whimsical artistic types. You're writing away, creative energy leaking out of you like you're Boromir drinking a glass of water, when suddenly it happens. You get a slightly differeny but way better idea than you had originally. And if this character does that...then that will explain why...and then at the end we can...Oh ho HO! This is hot stuff! So long, story! You have held me back long enough! I'm going to start again, and this time do it properly with all these super awesome ideas.
Repeat. Ad. Infinitum.
Honestly, how many stories has this person ever completed? How many threads of narrative have they ever seen through from start to finish, making adjustments and refining as they go, but finally reaching the finish line?
I have no data. But I'm going to guess 'not bloody many'.
The fact is that without that outline - that vital direction to tell you where to go next when you're in the guts of bashing out those thousands of story words - you're little more than marking time until your brain gets bored with one idea and begs you to try another. You're sabotaging yourself from word one. And once you convince yourself that the story you're writing is inferior to the one you want to write, you'll never put pen to page on that project again. And if I know anything for sure in the universe, I know this: In the middle of your next project, the exact same thing will happen
Luckily, there's a way to test whether or not your story ideas are going to be able to sustain you until the conclusion. It's kind of like writing the whole novel, but in shorthand. It's like doing in 2, 3, or 4 thousand words what you'd otherwise be doing in 80 so that if you do need to alter or change your core ideas and concepts, you haven't wasted weeks or months.
Author, meet outline. Your new best friend.
2 - Only my characters know how my story is going to end!
If a famous author comments on this thread putting me wrong, I will gladly retract this initial statement:
I have only ever heard extremely amatuerish, hobbyist writers ever say this and mean it. I can nearly guarantee that no published author genuinely believes that their characters - either in a metaphorical or physical way - have a hand in deciding the outcome of a novel.
You've heard it so often. You might have said it yourself.
'It was amazing. I sat down with these two characters in my head, and they were so real that the words just came. It's like they were writing themselves.'
Incorrect. Here's a quick insight as to how these brilliant characters appear to write themselves. I'll continue the hypothetical I just began:
'So my character, she's a pirate captain, right? And it begins when she washes up ashore on an island without her ship - it's been stolen from her. She's so quirky and headstrong, though, that she doesn't even skip a beat! She tries to steal one from the very same dock, but gets caught by the guards. Not one to let this get her down, she orchestrates her escape and breaks in to the blacksmith's store to try and break her shackles. But then, my OTHER character appears - the hot but naive blacksmith's apprentice catches her! And I totally didn't realise they would do this, but they got in to a sword fight! HOLY CRAP, right! And so my MC loses and is sent to prison. But that night, her ship shows up to attack the island...'
If you haven't caught on to the plot of Pirates of the Carribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl yet, you'll at least be able to recognise it when you read it back.
Letting your characters write themselves is simply tapping in to your subconscious and plagiarising the shit out of whatever you last read/watched/listened to. I'm serious. Do not let your characters write your story - they are dirty little thieves. They are archetypes trying to fit themselves to a narrative, and you have got literally hundreds of ready-made ones swimming around in your head. You know where you got them from? Other people. Other authors. Filmmakers. Places that are not your own imagination.
There is a school of thought that says that there is no more creativity and all stories are simply plagiarisms of other works to some degree. Maybe so, but you're not going to notice or filter that if you've convinced yourself that your characters are in charge of the plot.
You know where it's easiest to spot the parallels between your story and every other story in the world?
You guessed it. The outline.
Is there nothing these magical documents can't do?
3 - Outlining is an unnecessary step akin to double handling my words
The drawback to this line of thinking ought to be quickly obvious.
So you're writing away, putting down every scene exactly as it is framed in your head. Only all of a sudden, at chapter seven, you realise that the two plot threads you are trying to weave together are not going to intersect at the right moment. Or you realise that your character's motivations are suspect and that to fix them you're going to need to change a vital element of their backstory. Or you realise that your villain shouldn't be introduced until chapter eight and you've shoehorned him in to every other chapter since the prologue.
Suddenly, in order to correct these narrative errors, you have to change the entire manuscript. Thousands and thousands of words, each with run-on effects and cause and effect issues. The potential to overlook a single reference to the 'old story' is enormous, leaving your 'new story' with dozens of non-sensical lines that make you plead with readers, 'that wasn't meant to be there!'.
The outline is where this all gets sorted out. The outline is your ticket to the finish line. The outline is permission to write your arse off in the manuscript phase without getting stumped on where you're going or how you should be assembling your narrative.
The outline is your friend.
Pantsing. (syn) Procrastination.
Seriously.
Guys, seriously.
I know the real reason that people don't outline. It's not any of these mystical and rad-sounding reasons about limiting creativity and letting the body be a conduit for the muse. The simple fact is that people won't outline because they are lazy. They don't want to have to deal with the minutiae of how this scene is going to fit with that scene because that's hard work. It's often difficult to decide exactly how we're going to get from point A to point B.
But all you're doing is putting off the inevitable. Procrastinating. Sweeping your problems under the rug, where they will congeal and rot. Keep in mind that at some point, you ARE going to have to look under that rug. You're going to have to deal with these problems of continuity and character development.
Would it not be best to do it before you've committed thousands of words and dozens, maybe hundreds of hours to your work? Doesn't that just make more sense?
Maybe not before you start, but somewhere about page 103 when you hit the wall? That advice is going to sound like that one guy standing on the dock as the Titanic pulled away shouting 'keep an eye out for icebergs!'. People probably thought he was an idiot at the time, huh?
Trust me. I've tried to write a lot of books. I have finished writing four of them. The only way I managed it was with a rigorous, robust and well-read outline at my side every step of the way.
If you're about to do NaNoWriMo, give it a try. There are, at time of writing, seven days to get your outline together. I'm going to make the bold prediction that those who get to their 50,000 word goal are the ones who already know how they're going to get there.
In the interests of full disclosure, I 'Pantsed' this blog entry.
That's why it's so sloppy and disjointed.
And also why this concluding paragraph is so abrupt.
If you’re reading this – and I include myself in that group, for I too am reading these words as I write – you are almost certainly not a prodigiously talented writer
I mean it. The odds on are so astronomical that I can say, with the reasonable expectation that I’ll never be proven wrong, that I am 100% sure that you aren’t a better writer than Stephen King. Or Kurt Vonnegut. Or Cormack McCarthy. Or whoever else you want to nominate as your favourite textual prodigy. It’s no insult to all of us to say that we’ll never be those guys. We could sell forty novels apiece – one hundred novels apiece – and have not a one of them be considered on a level like that. Some people come out of the womb screaming and kicking, others come out screaming and kicking ass.
Ladies and gents, we did the former.
What the hell has this got to do with Pantsing? For that matter, what the hell IS PANTSING??
Sorry. I always forget to define my terms.
That’s one of the reasons why I don’t ‘Pants’, but I digress.
When I say ‘pantsing’, I’m not talking about the act of pulling someone’s pants down. That’s a cruel and hilarious thing you do to people during an argument when you can’t think of a witty thing to say.
For the purpose of this blog I’m talking about the act of writing your manuscript without an outline to guide you. Literally, sitting down to write without a clue as to what comes next. Maybe you have a vague idea of where you want to go, but getting there? That’s an adventure, man. That’s where the creativity kicks in and the fingers do the rest. The term comes from the idiom ‘flying by the seat of your pants’. You don’t need no stinkin’ forethought to get your ideas across. They’re all up there, waiting to be put on a page, and any attempt to try and capture the gist of them in a simplified, overall way will utterly destroy those ideas.
Perhaps the best way for me to put this will be to list a couple of common phrases I’ve heard to justify and promote Pantsing:
I don’t outline because it limits my creativity. I don’t want to be locked in to one narrative strain that has to go a certain way with no room for expansion or, if the fancy takes me, an entirely different plot to the original! I’d never put so severe a handbrake on myself as an outline. That’s like saying you’re going on a holiday but staying on the train the whole time
I like to begin writing and let my characters take over. They’re kind of like real people in my head, you know, and I just give voice to them. What they do is up to them, and I can’t wait to see where they take me! Also, I’m making dinner for them later. T-bones. Hope they’re hungry
I know what I want to say already. Outlining would simply be a waste of time. I’ve got this thing planned out scene by scene in my head. What difference does it make if it’s written down? Spare me your trivialities
Did you notice how I took a kind of cynical tone with all of those examples? There’s a reason for that.
They’re all bullshit
1 – Outlining Limits My Creativity
I hear this one so, so much
Some people seem to be operating under the delusion that writing an outline is somehow different from writing literally anything else. As far as I can tell, they imagine that once they write ‘The End’ at the end of their outline, there is absolutely no opportunity to go back and alter it in any way. The document locks. Their administrator privileges are set to ‘Read Only’ forever. Any hand written versions are despatched to that facility in Indiana Jones and hidden away in a warehouse so big that it’ll never be found again
I feel orders of magnitude stupider just typing this, but that's not true at all! Your outline is as amorphos as your imagination, and just as editable as any manuscript. Why on earth does having it prevent your imagination from changing the arc of your story on the slightest of whims? If anything, it's going to be far easier to alter an outline than it is a manuscript. Outlines can be chopped, changed and edited with little to no effort and -- this is important -- without sapping your excitement for the project altogether
Momentum is a fickle thing. I understand how it happens to us changeable, whimsical artistic types. You're writing away, creative energy leaking out of you like you're Boromir drinking a glass of water, when suddenly it happens. You get a slightly differeny but way better idea than you had originally. And if this character does that...then that will explain why...and then at the end we can...Oh ho HO! This is hot stuff! So long, story! You have held me back long enough! I'm going to start again, and this time do it properly with all these super awesome ideas.
Repeat. Ad. Infinitum.
Honestly, how many stories has this person ever completed? How many threads of narrative have they ever seen through from start to finish, making adjustments and refining as they go, but finally reaching the finish line?
I have no data. But I'm going to guess 'not bloody many'.
The fact is that without that outline - that vital direction to tell you where to go next when you're in the guts of bashing out those thousands of story words - you're little more than marking time until your brain gets bored with one idea and begs you to try another. You're sabotaging yourself from word one. And once you convince yourself that the story you're writing is inferior to the one you want to write, you'll never put pen to page on that project again. And if I know anything for sure in the universe, I know this: In the middle of your next project, the exact same thing will happen
Luckily, there's a way to test whether or not your story ideas are going to be able to sustain you until the conclusion. It's kind of like writing the whole novel, but in shorthand. It's like doing in 2, 3, or 4 thousand words what you'd otherwise be doing in 80 so that if you do need to alter or change your core ideas and concepts, you haven't wasted weeks or months.
Author, meet outline. Your new best friend.
2 - Only my characters know how my story is going to end!
If a famous author comments on this thread putting me wrong, I will gladly retract this initial statement:
I have only ever heard extremely amatuerish, hobbyist writers ever say this and mean it. I can nearly guarantee that no published author genuinely believes that their characters - either in a metaphorical or physical way - have a hand in deciding the outcome of a novel.
You've heard it so often. You might have said it yourself.
'It was amazing. I sat down with these two characters in my head, and they were so real that the words just came. It's like they were writing themselves.'
Incorrect. Here's a quick insight as to how these brilliant characters appear to write themselves. I'll continue the hypothetical I just began:
'So my character, she's a pirate captain, right? And it begins when she washes up ashore on an island without her ship - it's been stolen from her. She's so quirky and headstrong, though, that she doesn't even skip a beat! She tries to steal one from the very same dock, but gets caught by the guards. Not one to let this get her down, she orchestrates her escape and breaks in to the blacksmith's store to try and break her shackles. But then, my OTHER character appears - the hot but naive blacksmith's apprentice catches her! And I totally didn't realise they would do this, but they got in to a sword fight! HOLY CRAP, right! And so my MC loses and is sent to prison. But that night, her ship shows up to attack the island...'
If you haven't caught on to the plot of Pirates of the Carribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl yet, you'll at least be able to recognise it when you read it back.
Letting your characters write themselves is simply tapping in to your subconscious and plagiarising the shit out of whatever you last read/watched/listened to. I'm serious. Do not let your characters write your story - they are dirty little thieves. They are archetypes trying to fit themselves to a narrative, and you have got literally hundreds of ready-made ones swimming around in your head. You know where you got them from? Other people. Other authors. Filmmakers. Places that are not your own imagination.
There is a school of thought that says that there is no more creativity and all stories are simply plagiarisms of other works to some degree. Maybe so, but you're not going to notice or filter that if you've convinced yourself that your characters are in charge of the plot.
You know where it's easiest to spot the parallels between your story and every other story in the world?
You guessed it. The outline.
Is there nothing these magical documents can't do?
3 - Outlining is an unnecessary step akin to double handling my words
The drawback to this line of thinking ought to be quickly obvious.
So you're writing away, putting down every scene exactly as it is framed in your head. Only all of a sudden, at chapter seven, you realise that the two plot threads you are trying to weave together are not going to intersect at the right moment. Or you realise that your character's motivations are suspect and that to fix them you're going to need to change a vital element of their backstory. Or you realise that your villain shouldn't be introduced until chapter eight and you've shoehorned him in to every other chapter since the prologue.
Suddenly, in order to correct these narrative errors, you have to change the entire manuscript. Thousands and thousands of words, each with run-on effects and cause and effect issues. The potential to overlook a single reference to the 'old story' is enormous, leaving your 'new story' with dozens of non-sensical lines that make you plead with readers, 'that wasn't meant to be there!'.
The outline is where this all gets sorted out. The outline is your ticket to the finish line. The outline is permission to write your arse off in the manuscript phase without getting stumped on where you're going or how you should be assembling your narrative.
The outline is your friend.
Pantsing. (syn) Procrastination.
Seriously.
Guys, seriously.
I know the real reason that people don't outline. It's not any of these mystical and rad-sounding reasons about limiting creativity and letting the body be a conduit for the muse. The simple fact is that people won't outline because they are lazy. They don't want to have to deal with the minutiae of how this scene is going to fit with that scene because that's hard work. It's often difficult to decide exactly how we're going to get from point A to point B.
But all you're doing is putting off the inevitable. Procrastinating. Sweeping your problems under the rug, where they will congeal and rot. Keep in mind that at some point, you ARE going to have to look under that rug. You're going to have to deal with these problems of continuity and character development.
Would it not be best to do it before you've committed thousands of words and dozens, maybe hundreds of hours to your work? Doesn't that just make more sense?
Maybe not before you start, but somewhere about page 103 when you hit the wall? That advice is going to sound like that one guy standing on the dock as the Titanic pulled away shouting 'keep an eye out for icebergs!'. People probably thought he was an idiot at the time, huh?
Trust me. I've tried to write a lot of books. I have finished writing four of them. The only way I managed it was with a rigorous, robust and well-read outline at my side every step of the way.
If you're about to do NaNoWriMo, give it a try. There are, at time of writing, seven days to get your outline together. I'm going to make the bold prediction that those who get to their 50,000 word goal are the ones who already know how they're going to get there.
In the interests of full disclosure, I 'Pantsed' this blog entry.
That's why it's so sloppy and disjointed.
And also why this concluding paragraph is so abrupt.
I'm a plotter. And all of the things you mentioned are reasons that I think outlines are important. But I also think that pantsing is a valid approach if it works for you. You mention Stephen King - a famous panster who as far as I know has never used an outline in his life. Not to be cliche, but Rome? Many roads.
ReplyDeleteHi Annalise :)
ReplyDeleteBorrowing another phrase, you're right: Horses for Courses. A post like this is no fun, however, if I caveat it all with 'all of this only applies if you want it to' ;) I was rather hoping that it might attract an outraged pantser or two to come along and set me straight. It still might. I'd welcome it - exchange of ideas is my favourite thing.
So I guess my motivation behind this blog post was that in my opinion, not all the roads to Rome are good roads. I'm encouraging people to steer away from the road that is littered with booby traps and corpses and take the one with street lights and signposts.