Pantsers versus Outliners…Or Why I Am a Hybrid

An ongoing and endless debate in the world of writing is whether you, as an author, should just sit down and write a book, or outline it first.  Folks that just write by the seat of their pants are called ‘pantsers’.  Others, that take some time to outline, are called, predictably enough, ‘outliners’.

There is something very romantic about the notion of an author, ensconced in a room with a desk and typewriter, banging away at the keys until, as if by magic, the words ‘The End” appear on the last page.  I fell for this romantic illusion myself when I first started writing and within sixty days hammered out an 83,000 word novel.  Life was good.  I wrote “The End” and felt really good about myself.

I was a ‘pantser’ through and through. ‘Screw outlining’ I said to myself.  That’s for folks that can’t get in touch with their muse.  Me? I can’t get the muse to leave me alone…

The manuscript went off to edit.  I got it back a few weeks later with all the normal stuff ‘fixed’ and the obligatory edit notes.  Here is what I read that I liked – “It was a real page turner and would make a great movie.”  That’s cool.  The muse didn’t let me down.  But then I continued reading “You might want to work on character development a bit, the hero is a little one dimensional.”  Hmmmmm.  What does that mean?

So I set about doing the re-write and realized I had painted myself into a few corners with my plot. How?  By not paying attention to the pace of my story.  My muse apparently didn’t know anything about pace.

There is an old adage that a good story is pretty simple.  You somehow get the hero to climb a tree.  When she is feeling pretty good about her tree climbing skills, you throw rocks at her.  Then you get her out of the tree. Either by knocking her out with some hefty rocks or letting her descend on her own, torn and tattered.  Do that enough times over 80,000 to 100,000 words without losing the reader and you have a novel.  Maybe even a good one.

My problem is that my hero spent a good chunk of the early part of my story climbing one tree.  And she kept climbing and climbing and climbing.  And because my muse sucks at pace, my hero had climbed so high that I had a hard time reaching her with the rocks I was throwing at her.  I needed shorter trees. And more of them.

But here is the problem many ‘pantsers’ face. You can’t just go back and easily add more trees after the story has been written.  To do so, requires a ton more effort than banging out the original story.  Trees need to be planted, and nurtured.  Rocks need to be carefully chosen for size and weight.  Plus, the muse is easily bored.  At least mine is.  She wants to help me with the creative ‘new’ stuff, not ‘fixing’ the stuff we’ve already done.

Here is an embarrassing fact. I have spent more time re-writing than it took to write the original story.  I suspect that other folks that write by the seat of their pants have the same issue.  So I have come to the conclusion that ‘pantsers’ aren’t really writers at all.  They are ‘re-writers’. And because my muse and I don’t like re-writing that much, I have decided to do a little more planning on the next novel.

Not a full blown outline mind you.  My muse won’t tolerate that.  I am convinced that if I subject her to too much ‘planning’ she will run and hide and start drinking bourbon in the morning.  But I will definitely do some outlining and planning.  So I will become, in the end, a ‘pantser’ with a dash of “outliner’.  A ‘pantliner’… a hybrid.

Before I sit down to the write the next novel, I will at least think about the trees I want my hero to climb.  I’ll consider where I will plant the trees in my story.  How tall each tree will be.  How many branches the trees will have. Not every tree.  But the main ones to be sure.  And of course, I will choose some of the rocks I plan to throw as well.

But I will always leave some of the decisions to my muse. Why? Because when I give her some space, she grows some of the most interesting trees you have ever seen.  And don’t even get me started on the rocks she finds to throw…

An Interesting Way to Read (and Write) Fiction

The coming deluge of Kindle sales this year with the super low prices being offered by Amazon ($79!!!) means there will be a huge demand for high quality content for the foreseeable future.  This bodes well for writers of just about any genre.

One thing that has me concerned as I am getting ready to publish my 80,000 plus word novel, The Sequence, is the increasingly short attention spans we all have.  Is the time of the long novel behind us?  I mean seriously, who has time for it?  Even when eating, a task that is needed for survival, we only have time for the nuggets, not the whole chicken.

Fear not fellow novelists. I just read a cool post on CopyBlogger.com written by Sean Platt announcing his new ‘serialized’ novel Gone Tomorrow.

The book is delivered in six ‘episodes’, just a like a TV program.  Check it out here – http://www.copyblogger.com/ebook-revolution/

Is this the future of fiction?

Tools of a Writer…

I read somewhere where only five to ten percent of folks that start to write a book finish their work. That’s too bad because the world really needs fresh viewpoints and creativity. We collectively benefit from people sharing their insight, interests and as Seth Godin now calls it, their “weirdness”.

The problem with Word…

Part of the reason people don’t finish the book they start, is because the task quickly becomes overwhelming when using a traditional word processor like Word.  You open up Word and start banging away, and at about the 10,000 to 20,000 word mark, things start getting messy.  And Word does not make it easy to keep up with plot points, characters, time-lines etc.  You have to do that on a spreadsheet, on sticky notes or crib notes written in the palm of your hand. This is clumsy at best and completely ruins the creative flow of writing a book.

No, you don’t understand. I’m a ‘writer’, not a ‘re-writer’…

I recently received my 80,000 word novel back from my editor, filled with edit notes and comments.  Things to fix etc. Now, I won’t discuss it in detail here (topic for another post), but I had no idea that writing isn’t so much about writing as it is about re-writing. And re-writing is hard work.  Much harder than writing a first draft in my opinion. And I think the task of re-writing is tedious, if not impossible, when you are using Word.

So, faced with a mountain to climb and no visible trail up the side, I did what any normal person would do. I went to Staples and bought a case of extra-large sticky notes, one of those huge easel pads of paper (with sticky of course), markers, etc etc. Probably $100 worth of crap.  Then I came home to my office and tried to “organize” my novel.  All 80,000 words of it.

It did not take long to realize this was not going to work…

The walls of my office soon looked like a sticky note trade show booth.  Colorful to be sure, but a freaking mess.  But the problem wasn’t so much the wall of notes, it was still Word.

The problem with Word is that it is somewhat difficult to move chapters around.  In my books, each scene equals a chapter (I like this style of writing). I wanted to balance the scenes a little bit to account for different characters points of view. This is not a fun process in Word, which is pretty much designed for linear thinking and writing. Great for banging out a stream of consciousness from the muse, but it sucks as a platform for putting the pieces of two months of writing together in a finished novel that I will be proud of.

Software to the rescue…

Fortunately, I am not the only one in the world to see a problem with Word. I did the Google search thing and found quite a few software programs for writing a book.  I tried three of them.  Writers Blocks which I did not like at all although I think it has promise. I also tried Snowflake but quickly abandoned it because while I see promise in the Snowflake method, I didn’t care for how the software worked.  And lastly, I tried yWriter, which I fell in love with. This is the software I am currently using for my re-write project as well as a new project.

Why do I like yWriter? Because it lets you write in scenes.  Each scene is treated as a separate file, and you can move scenes around as needed.  Plus, it gives you the word count for each scene, and the total word count of scenes put together.  What is nice about this, is that it lets you quickly see where your dramatic scenes arrive in your story.

It is a good program and I highly recommend it.  Best of all, it’s free. That said, I am sure the creator would appreciate a donation if you like his work.  You can get yWriter here.