pantser

Pantser - "A NaNoWriMo* term that means that you 'fly by the seat of your pants' when you are writing your novel. You have nothing but the absolute basics planned out for your novel. This outlook towards writing is often opposed by the 'planner', who knows exactly what is going to happen, when it will happen, and where it will happen. There is often enmity between the two types of writers."

The above quote is lifted directly from the online Urban Dictionary** and I post it here because the whole debate of plotting versus pantsing (I might have just invented that word) is very much exercising my mind at the moment.

Back in September I wrote about the struggle I'd been having with doing any kind of writing at all, and how I'd employed one of my trusty old tricks for demolishing writer's block; namely writing for just eight minutes every morning. Well, as usual, the trick had worked for me and I found myself turning up at the blank page every morning to put pen to paper (if only for a short time) but now, three months on, I find I'm encountering another issue of a very different nature, I can't stop plotting. That's what I do every morning now, I sit down and plot my next story.

When I wrote my John Mann trilogy I was very much a pantser. I had very strong ideas about what the story was, where I wanted it to go, and how I wanted to get there, like the Urban Dictionary says, I had the absolute basics planned, but I didn't plot it all out in excruciating detail on a large sheet of paper, and I've never used any writing software like Scrivener (although I've been increasingly interested in giving that a road-test). Pantsing seemed to suit me at the time, and suit the way I was writing and, hey, if it ain't broke... Mind you (full disclosure) by the time it came to writing book 3 in the trilogy, John Mann - At Day's End, I did need that big piece of paper to help plot out exactly how a couple of the story strands would come together, so, you know, I'm not entirely unused to the notion of plotting out a story in some detail, and can testify to its usefulness, but I've not previously found myself in the position that I find myself in now.

For eight, and more, minutes every morning, I am plotting out minute details of the story that I'm currently working on. In detail. Forensic detail. And not only the how's, when's and why's of it either. I now know the intensity of the spotlight that a character sits under, backstage at a theatre. I know what colour (and model) Bentley another character drives, I know the army service record of a third. And I've done a lot of research too, into fascism in Britain, attitudes to homosexuality, and the effects of rationing in the early 1950s when the story is set. Plus the Bentley thing, I researched the colour of Bentleys too. What I'm saying is, I'm planning the pants off this thing. I've turned into the King of Detail.

I suppose many would say that this is a perfectly normal way to approach novel writing; that would be the plotters of the world. Others would call me crazy, and tell me to dive in and just get a first draft written; welcome to Pantser World. And even given all the work that I've already done, albeit incomplete, I feel the pull of the pantser's argument. Perhaps because it worked for me before. That, or I fear I may be shrugging myself into a straight-jacket that won't leave me any wriggle room, but I'll only discover it when I'm too far into the story to retrace my steps.

Another nagging doubt is that this is actually just a displacement activity, and I'm plotting like a lunatic in place of doing any real writing, plotting has become what I do now when I sit down at a blank page. It's what I do rather than write any stories. If I'm not careful I'm going to stoke up some real enmity between me and, well, myself.

*'NaNoWriMo', if you were wondering, stands for National Novel Writing Month - a creative challenge that takes place annually, each November.

**Turns out the Urban Dictionary lists another, unexpected, definition of the word Pantser. Maybe I should be more careful when I claim affiliation with this kind of writer.

"A Pantser is someone of either gender who is a major slut, so much so that their activities can be summed up as "pants on, pants off, pants on pants off...The Pantser!"