The earliest “How-to” book I remember reading on how to write was a little booklet that I received in my sixth grade language arts class. It was a big proponent of what I later learned to call pantsing. The book suggested sitting down with a blank piece of paper and pen or pencil (yes, it was that long ago) and just letting your imagination run wild. Quoting from memory: “Some of [the writing] will be pretty bad. That’s only to be expected when you really let yourself write freely. But some of it will be pretty good—probably the best stuff you’ve ever written,” at which point it simply becomes a matter of editing to turn your rambling free write into a masterpiece.
Perhaps it’s because this was one of the first pieces of serious writing advice that I ever read, or perhaps it’s because it fit with the sixth-grade Z. M.’s generally lazy approach to life, but for whatever reason, that advice imprinted itself on my brain. Even after I learned that there were other ways of doing things, that there were these people called “planners,” I clung to that first bit of advice like a baby chick remembering its first sight of Mom. “Oh, I’m a pantser,” I would say whenever someone asked me about my writing technique. While I would acknowledge the possibility of other people doing things differently, for me, obviously the right way to do things was sit in front of my computer and let the words flow as they would.
I was in my thirties before I started questioning that decision. I’m not sure what triggered it, but at some point, when I was about to give my pantser answer, I paused and thought about it. What, after all, had being a pantser gotten me? Oh, I’d managed to finish, I think, one novel, but for the most part what I had was a computer full of stories that were somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters complete and were never going to get any further. So I said to myself, “Maybe I’m not a pantser. Maybe I should give this whole planning thing a try.”
It turned out to be easier said than done. I outlined a couple of novels but didn’t have the discipline to keep writing to the end of my outline. I went back to pantsing a bunch. I tried outlining again, then got stuck in my outline so just went on to write the novel anyway. I tried various methods of outlining and found myself getting increasingly frustrated with them. I believe it took five years from that initial revelation that I wasn’t a pantser to the first time I successfully wrote a good outline and then produced a novel from that.
In the next few weeks, I’m going to be writing about how I figured it all out and finally embraced the inner planner. My hope is that it might help some people who are still struggling with pantsing but can’t find another way. It’s possible to plan without destroying your characters or draining all the passion out of the novel. A well-planned story can be a thing of beauty and a joy to write.