1. I sent out an email to the members of my Noveling Club. Yes. I am the president of an on-campus club of people who write novels (mostly during NaNoWriMo). Awesome.
2. I finished a short story for my science fiction and fantasy writing class. Yes. I have a class devoted entirely to the reading and writing of science fiction. Awesome.
These two bits of awesomeness in my life have been merging interestingly over the past several days as I’ve worked on this short story, because it is one of the rare instances in my life where I have experimented with the writing style known as “plotting”.
Plotting is very much what it sounds like–it means having an outline of what you’re going to write before you write it. This is in contrast to the writing method affectionately known to NaNoWriMo authors as “pantsing”, in which you start writing with only the vaguest notion of where you’re going. If plotting is the equivalent of using Google Maps to plan your roadtrip to a specific destination, then pantsing is grabbing some water and chips, jumping in your car, and driving in whichever direction seems to hold the promise of adventure.
Ahh, Google Maps.
As you may have guessed, I am a pantser by nature. 98% of my stories are begun with no clear sense of where they’re headed–I just find an interesting character or scenario and run with it. And surprisingly, this usually works out pretty well. I may not know where the story is going, but I discover all sorts of cool things along the way, and rather than creating themes, characters, subplots, and an ending, I find them lurking in dark corners or hiding under lace doilies (endings in particular have a fondness for doilies; I think they like being hidden-but-in-plain-sight).
This short story, however, became an exercise in plotting when I sat down with my friend Michael earlier this week and bemoaned the fact that I had too many ideas and no clear sense of which one to pick. Michael, bless him, immediately suggested that I build upon a preexisting story idea–namely, the idea I’d been planning to use for NaNoWriMo 2011 (more on this as NaNo approaches). Over the course of about 30 minutes, we bounced around potential plots, and eventually the random plot bunnies coalesced into a rather cohesive story arc.
And that’s where the trouble started.
Armed with a clear idea and characters in mind, I started writing the story…and discovered almost instantly that my writing pace had slowed to one-quarter impulse (high five if you get that reference). With an outline (not even a very detailed one, mind you), I suddenly found myself ploughing slowly through scenes that, under different circumstances, I would have dashed off in a few minutes. I agonized over sentence structure and scene ordering; I went back and edited as I went (a big no-no in NaNo-style pantsing); I puzzled over how best to convey information to the reader.
It’s important to emphasize that none of these are necessarily bad ways to write–they’re just very unfamiliar to me, at least where first drafts are concerned. The result? All in all, I’m estimating that it took me nearly 20 hours of work to generate a 4,000 word story draft. By my personal, NaNoWriMo-inspired standards, that’s pretty pathetic. While I’m nowhere near amazing/crazy folks like Kate (who is known as Kateness on the NaNo forums and who wrote 1,000,000 words in November 2009), I can churn out 1,000 words an hour if necessary–sometimes more. So why did it take me so long to write a story that wasn’t ultimately all that much better than any other first draft I’ve ever written?
My theory is this: in plotting out what was going to happen, I (obviously) gave myself a frame to follow. However, as someone who does not generally follow frames, I found that it took a lot more effort to make sure I stayed within the boundaries I had drawn for myself. Would the world have ended if I’d taken the story off its leash and let it run free? Probably not. It was just that I happened to like the plot that Michael and I had brainstormed and kind of wanted the story to go that way. In the end, it was the effort of keeping the story contained that made it so time-consuming to write.
This experience has made me a little bit nervous for my 2011 NaNo because it is (as you’ll know if you clicked on that link back in the 6th or 7th paragraph) the most detailed plot bunny I’ve ever had for NaNoWriMo. I don’t know much about the world or characters, but I know the arc of the story, what the major conflict is, and even have a vague inkling of how it might end.
Does this mean that pantsing is off the table? Of course not. I’m just going to have to find a way to integrate my normal freewheeling style with this more precise structure. And the open-endedness of the characters and world will definitely help with this. So, I’m hopeful. Keep your fingers crossed come November.
So, fellow writers, I have two questions:
1. Do you think you’re more of a plotter or more of a pantser (it’s okay to be in between–it’s a continuum)?
2. Are any of you doing NaNoWriMo this year? If so, do you have any idea what you’re writing about yet? (Also, you should all add me as a buddy!)
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Tags: college, creative writing, inspiration, nanowrimo, short story, writing, writing fiction, writing worries
Am I on the Novelling Club panlist? You promised that I was, but I didn’t get an email from you. *sadface*
I’m an inbetweener, really, but it was a learning process. My first couple of NaNos, I thought I could wing it, and completely failed. I also tried following a fairly strict outline one year, and even though I didn’t have any trouble writing the novel, I veered away from the outline before I was even halfway through, so that didn’t work either. This year, I’m trying Lazette Gifford’s Phase Outline technique, which looks as if it will work well with my obsessive note-writing.
For me, the time element is what’s most important. I’m not terribly imaginative, and my stories can take a long time to work out. That’s impossible during Nano, so I have to have some kind of guideline. That’s how I did my last two NaNos. But I’ve also written (and self-published) two novels that were much more pantsing, even if they did take several months each. This year’s novel is going to be very complex, so I’d be lost without some kind preplanned structure.
Honestly I think different WIP demand different things. Generally, I’m in the middle of the continuum – I have a vague idea of where I want to go, but I don’t take notes and have a very “I’ll decide what to do when I get there” attitude. This has worked for some stories but not all. KtLO is heavily in the plotting direction at the moment because otherwise I get lost in it.
Plotting and pantsing both have pros and cons. Pantsing can make you run into dead ends, where you realize that maybe you really should have made a decision on that one thing back in the planning stages. Plotting can suffocate you.
I think it’s hard because there’s no one right way that will always work for everyone, nor is there one way that will always work for you.
I think you’re absolutely right that it depends on the story in question. I also think it makes a difference what you’re used to and/or comfortable with–like, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with plotting, but it’s not a style of storywriting that I’m really familiar with. That said, I do move back and forth along the continuum with different stories.
Soo…I guess the point is that it all just depends? :-p
Congratulations on your club and your class!
I used to be a complete pantser, but I’ve been starting to discover the joy of plotting – sometimes. And yes, I’m doing Nano this year, but I think I may rebel a little and finally write a story that I’ve started before, but never finished.
This makes me think of a quandry I find myself in frequently – whether ’tis nobler to be structured or free-flowing in how I approach… well, anything. Cooking, teaching, doing yoga, keeping chart notes on clients. My natural tendency is to trust the flow as it takes me, but I am always admiring those who have a more structured approach. This may be wrong of me, but I think I tend to see the structured approach as a more human/ego motivated method, and the free-flow (or pantsing) approach as a more Spirit-lead method. I’d like to cultivate the middle-way myself.