021: Plotters vs. Pantsers

Learn the meaning behind the terms "plotter" and "pantser." I cover benefits and drawbacks of each approach, as well as how to use a hybrid model to write your book.

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Plotters vs. Pantsers

Hi, Friends, this episode is not meant to be divisive. I'm not pitting plotters and pantsers against each other. Just merely put the disclaimer out there upfront. Okay, I'm really, I really want to talk about the benefits and the drawbacks of each of these types of approaches to writing your story. There's enough weird divisions in the writing community, we don't need to have this be one of them. There's no right answer. Whatever works for you is great. At the end of this episode, I'm going to tell you which one I am my my writing approach. But really, you can decide what works best for you.

Now, if you're totally new to writing, and you've never heard these terms before, or if you have, but you're not really sure exactly what they mean. Let me just explain them briefly. So plotter is someone who likes to plan their story ahead of time, they like to plot the story ahead of time, meaning they outline what the story is going to be what's going to happen. And there are different levels of this, some plotters prefer to just have kind of a rough outline and, and have a good idea of what happens, who the characters are how things end. Some plotters are very detailed to the point where they will literally plot every single scene that happens in the book, it's all part of the the big picture of it, they like to see how everything fits together. And they don't start writing until they've got that in place.

Pantsers on the other hand, are people who just like to dive in and start writing and see where the story goes. Maybe they start with a brief image in their mind, they start with a rough idea of a character that they want to have in this story in this world. But that might be it. And they're called pantsers, because it refers to kind of flying by the seat of your pants or riding by the seat of your pants, I guess. Again, no right method. What I want to talk about here is just again, benefits of each and then some disadvantages of each approach. So you can kind of think about what might be best for you. If you're not sure.

So the benefits of being a plotter. If you take the time to really develop the story ahead of time, if you plot things, if you know exactly what happens, you have the advantage of having a clear story arc. If you've seen, for example, like the three act structure, or even the Save the cat method, or the snowball method, or whatever outlining method you might have heard of or be familiar with, there's a clear structure to the story. And plotters have the advantage of understanding where the story is flowing. What the setup is, it's it's clear from the get go. It's almost like they're arranging pieces on a chessboard, because they can see how things are set up.

And that also means that you have most likely, you have something that kicks the story off some kind of hook or catalyst inciting incident, you've got a midpoint, you've got rising action, you've got the climax, you've got the falling action. There's a lot of these basic story plot points in place. Now. It also allows you to really understand your characters better if you take some time to plot out what happens to them in the story. What journey do they go on? What are they searching for? What are they hoping for? What do they want? I think it allows people to really understand their characters before they start writing.

Now one of the drawbacks of well, actually, let me let me talk about one other benefit before we get to drawbacks. So one other benefit is that if you plot correctly, and you plot your story, you've done all this work ahead of time, you're probably not going to have as much work to do in the revision process. Because you're clear on when things happen. What happens, of course, there's still going to be revising there's, there's always revision that happens in, you know, multiple drafts of your story in the editing process. But you probably won't have to completely overhaul the story. If you've plotted it ahead of time.

Now, one of the drawbacks with being a plotter is obviously, that you have to do all this work upfront, you have to, you have to take time to do this. And if you're someone who wants to dive in and just jump in and start writing right away, that can be difficult, it can be difficult to kind of hold yourself back and think like, no, wait, I know, I'm excited to jump into the story. But I have to take some time to think about the structure, think about what I want to have happen in the book. Another potential drawback, I see a potential because it depends how rigorous of rigorous of a plotter you are. There isn't always room for the story to shift for the characters to go on slightly different paths than you anticipated, there isn't always room to change things.

So if you have a very detailed, rigorous plot, and then to the point where you're mapping out every single scene that happens in the book, and then you start writing, and you realize, oh, wait a second, this scene that I thought was going to take an entire chapter actually only needs to take two pages. So that means I've got a I've got to, you know, make that up somewhere else. Or maybe this character that you thought was going to go on this very specific path in this very specific journey in the story. Maybe that's actually not right for their character, like the more than I'm writing in their voice, the more that I'm understanding them, the more that I'm seeing how they respond to other characters in this world that I've created, the more I realized that actually, they need to do this other thing entirely. So there's not always as much room to do that. Of course, plotters a lot of times will allow for flexibility, they'll put some breathing room in there. So it's not like you have to scrap the whole manuscript if you decide to make a change. But that is something that you could run into if you're more of a plotter.

Pantsers. So benefits of being a pantser. Like I mentioned earlier, if you are one of those people, one of those writers who likes to just jump in, you've got this idea, you're so excited, you're like, I can't believe I never thought is before I can't believe a book has been written like this, I can't believe I haven't seen a character like this, whatever, you get to dive in and start writing, you get to take advantage of that excitement and that momentum, which is fantastic. Because that can really propel you through the first part of your story. And you can get it done really quickly. There's also room like to change and then the story can change, the story can shift, the story can grow, you can get 10% of the way in and realize, Wait, this isn't actually what I want to do. And then you can shift and you haven't you don't lose the rest of your outline, you don't lose the rest of your plotting that you've done.

I think one of the big drawbacks is kind of again, like the flip side of what we just mentioned with with in our plotters discussion is that you do probably, you're probably going to have to do more work in the revision stage. Because things might really have to shift. As far as the sequence of events, the pacing, maybe you're, you get halfway through and you lose steam. You're like, Okay, I don't actually know what happens at the end of the story. I've gotten to the 40,000 word mark, I've gotten to the 50,000 word mark, whatever. I have no idea what happens after this, my characters are stuck in this particular point. I don't know how to resolve this. There's all these plot issues. There's all these plot holes, like how am I ever going to get to the end of this. And that can be kind of demoralizing to get to that point of realizing like, oh crap, I did all this work to write to get to this point. And now I have no idea what happens next. And it's it's part of that, you know, not having like a solid story structure.

Now with a pantser. You will get that story structure in the revision phase if it's not there in the first draft. If your first draft is just a collection of scenes and you have a rough idea of what the story is, that's totally fine. Remember, your first draft is just for you. No one else will see it. It doesn't matter how messy it is, or chaotic it is. Once you have the rough draft written then you could go in and identify Okay, so this thing here that happens in chapter two is probably the catalyst or the Insight The incident, okay, so then at the midpoint, here's the shift that needs to happen or the twist. Okay, here's the rising action, like you can kind of identify those things after you get done writing. But that means that you might have to shift things around, delete chapters move things, right a lot more in the middle, there's just there's a potential for a lot of structural work that has to happen at the end to shape your book once it's finished.

So I, my approach is I want to be a pantser. I'm kind of a hybrid, I want to be a pantser in the sense that it's very easy for me to start stories, I get story ideas pretty, it's not super difficult for me to come up with a story idea or with a book idea. I have a little bit of idea of the character, I have some some ideas what happens and I want to just go, I just want to start writing. But I have learned over the course of writing both of my books and working on a couple of other works in progress now and helping other people write their books, that having a little bit of a plot a little bit of a, some plotting a little bit of an outline can be so helpful to start with. So I'm my nature is to pants it. But I am moving more towards being a plotter, just so that I don't run into issues halfway through, I don't run into issues at the end, where there's big changes that need to happen. The book is written either way, like I, one thing that happened with my second book is that I learned a lot from my first book where I didn't know how the story was going to resolve, I didn't know what was happening. And about halfway through, I got stuck. And I sat on the book for a few months, because I couldn't decide what to do with it, I was ready to throw in the towel because I didn't know the direction that things were going in. So in my second book, I was like, Okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna plot I'm gonna create a detailed outline. And I did, I created a chapter outline. So I knew exactly what was happening in every chapter, even a few scenes. And then once I started writing, I got about 10,000 words in and I realized the story was totally wrong.

I was writing from the perspective of a college student, and I didn't want to, I wanted to write from the perspective of an adult who's looking back on some things that happened during their college years. So then all of this, this whole outline that I created was just totally meaningless, because I realized I needed to shift, to create a new character, essentially, she could have some of the same characteristics and traits, but she was going to be an adult, not an 18 year old. I mean, 18 year olds are adults, but you know what I mean, she was going to be like in her 30s. So I think what needs to happen for me is there needs to be some kind of happy medium, which you can do, you can take elements of being a plot, or you can take elements of being a pantser figure out what works for you. I like to have a kind of rough framework to put my story in and, and then there's lots of room for things to grow and change and shift and there's that flexibility that's built into it.

I am curious, I would love to do a poll of like all the writers on Tik Tok or Instagram or whatever, and just like poll to see how many people identify as plotters and how many identifies as identify as Pantsers? I don't know. I'll be curious. I don't think we can ever. I don't know how we'd ever get that to happen. But maybe, maybe informally. I'll do a survey, maybe like I'll do a tiktok post or something about, tik tok video about about this because I am curious. And I'm also curious about genres. Like I think if you're world building, and you're writing fantasy or science fiction, you have to do some plotting ahead of time because you have to develop the world and figure out the logistics of the story before you can really dive in. But so I would imagine that fantasy writers and sci fi writers are more likely to be plotters, but it'd be interesting to see.

Katie Wolf