Pantsing vs. Plotting

In the matchup between outlining your story and writing by the seat of your pants, which method comes out victorious?

If you hang around writers enough (you should; we’re an eccentric bunch) you’ll hear them speak about two types of writers: the Pantser (also known as the Gardener) and the Plotter (also known as the Architect).

The Pantser is so-called because she “flies by the seat of her pants.” She figures things out as she goes along. She might have a general idea where the story’s going, but she lets her instincts guide her path. And she’s okay with surprises.

The Plotter, on the other hand, does just that: she plots. She outlines. She has rigid guidelines which she wants to follow, and she hews to it like a tight-rope walker crossing a rocky chasm.

I’ve used both methods in my work, and I will outline some of the benefits and drawbacks of each here.

The Benefits of Pantsing

Writing by the seat of your pants is fun. You start with a basic premise, for example, a far-future universe where humanity has long since gone extinct. In my Nebula-nominated short story, “The Meeker and the All-Seeing Eye,” I did just that. Right before I went to bed one night, the opening line came to me, almost out of thin air:

“As the Meeker and the All-Seeing Eye wandered the galaxy harvesting dead stars, they liked to talk.”

I liked this immediately and wrote it down on a little yellow sticky note (one of these days I have to see if I can find it). It was evocative — who was the Meeker and this All-Seeing Eye? And harvesting dead stars, what was that all about?

I took that line and ran with it, fleshing out the characters. Well, the Meeker should be meek, shouldn’t he? And the All-Seeing Eye, well she needs to be all powerful, of course. And what’s this part about harvesting dead stars? Ah, yes, they’re billions of years in our future, and many stars have burnt out. And why do they harvest dead stars? Maybe because the All-Seeing Eye needs the mass for her enormous computer mind. Yes!

The story opened up much like this. I honestly had no idea where the story was going as I began. But as I progressed, the world began to unfold. Soon, they uncover an artifact, which encodes an ancient human woman named Beth. Why is this woman there? Someone left a record of her in space? Why? As a weapon, of course, against the malicious All-Seeing Eye. But how could one destroy an all-powerful being? By exploiting its one weakness: the Eye’s insatiable curiosity.

Pantsing affords you an enormous amount of creativity. At any moment, anything can happen, and the writer often doesn’t know how things will play out. This is how things develop in real life too. Sure, you have a daily schedule, and you mostly stick to it. But unexpected things will happen. Your plans are foiled by life. Sometimes these changes are mundane, like if someone reschedules a meeting. But sometimes they are life-changing, like when you find out a loved one has unexpectedly died.

One of the things I’ve discovered is that if the writer doesn’t know where the story is going, then the reader likely doesn’t either. Sometimes knowing where the story is heading can be exciting: we sense there’s a great battle on the horizon, and the build up to that is thrilling. But when the story takes an unexpected turn slantways or leftways, it creates a sense that the world you created is dynamic and shifting, and this can give a sense of verisimilitude and possibility that your story might otherwise lack.

We’ve all read those books where, by the end of Act I, we can predict where the story ends. And while those kinds of stories can still be fun, there are often few surprises, and you can risk boring your reader: Ah, yes, I know where she’s going. Sigh. I wonder what’s trending on Twitter…

Another interesting thing that happens when you’re writing in pantsing mode, is that you might find your characters take on minds of their own. Sure, you thought you’d have your protagonist go off to fight the evil baddie, but she desperately wants to go to the underground club and dance until the wee hours. And when this happens, that’s an excellent sign that you’ve created a strong character. The worst thing you can do, when this happens, is to shoe-horn your character into your preconceived plot when she’s telling you that she’d much rather do something else. Your readers will say to themselves, I don’t believe Kim Protagonist would ever do that, and you risk frustrating them. If your characters tell you what they want to do, my god, listen to them!

But one of the risks of pantsing is that you find yourself three quarters of the way through your story and you’re nowhere near the end. Real life doesn’t have neat little chapters and acts. It’s messy and convoluted. But books and stories need to end. In the pantsing mode, you might find yourself deep in the woods with no idea how you got there, and you’re not sure which direction to turn. This is when you end up with a first draft of 500,000 words. Maybe if you’re Brandon Sanderson, that’s fine. But for most of us, we need to come to a satisfactory conclusion much sooner.

So I suggest this for the pantser: it’s okay to wander, but make sure you look up and get your bearings from time to time, so you don’t end up too far out in the weeds.

The Benefits of Plotting

Plotting, on the other hand, has one great benefit over pantsing: knowing the ending in advance, you can coordinate all your plot threads to converge on a powerful emotional payoff. In my story “The Sounds of Old Earth” (also a Nebula Finalist), I plotted out the story from beginning to end before I began. I wrote a sentence or two for each scene and filled in the details later.

Abner is an old man who is being forced to relocate to New Earth, a brand new planet created to replace the diseased and dying old Earth. But Abner’s home holds so much history. It’s been in his family for generations. He’s gone to sleep each summer night to the sound of croaking frogs. He can’t dream of giving up his ancestral home.

I knew how I wanted the story to end. I won’t spoil it if you haven’t read it, but let’s just say I wanted the ending to be poignant. But I had to get the reader engaged with Abner’s plight. I interspersed scenes of Abner walking around his dying town (dying both literally and figuratively) juxtaposed with flashbacks of his former joy. The contrast was striking, and I found myself tearing up. I wasn’t the only one. Ellen Datlow said of the story, “This is gorgeous, melancholy, and heartbreaking. I highly rec it (I cried through most of it).”

I don’t think my story would have had the same emotional effect if I had “pantsed” it. That’s not to say that you can’t have an emotional effect by pantsing. Jeffrey Ford says he starts with a premise and just goes with it. He never outlines, and I find his stories are often powerfully affecting. But in my case, outlining the story before I wrote it allowed me to perfectly juxtapose the high and lows to take the reader on a (hopefully pleasing) emotional rollercoaster, which lands exactly where I want them to.

The benefit of outlining is this: foreknowledge. Your puzzle pieces can fit together perfectly, and when done well the payoff can be immensely satisfying.

There are some drawbacks when outlining, though, which is why I don’t always use the technique. For one, stories that hew to an outline too perfectly can sometimes seem wooden and rigid. Characters may do unlikely things in order to fit the plot, which risks alienating your readers. Also sometimes, when writing from an outline, you may find that, when things are fleshed out, the outline is too simplistic. You may need to change a plot point to make things more believable. Or you may find that one thing that sounded great in an outline doesn’t actually work when you fill in all the details. When his happens, it’s always better in my opinion to change the outline to fit the story rather than the opposite. The story must always come first.

The last thing I’ll say about outlining is: beware the quicksand. I’ve seen some writers get so stuck in outlines and research and plotting, that they have collected dozens of pages of outlines and notes for their novels and stories, but have never actually written any words of prose. Outlining should be a tool to help you write your story. It should not become a substitute for one.

So which is better, the pantser or the plotter?

The answer is: whichever one works better for you. If you like to plan things out in detail before you begin something, if you want to know every small detail in advance, and if you like to have a guide map to lead you along, plotting might work better for you. But if you are the wandering type, the explorer, who is okay with getting lost, who just follows where the trail leads you, then pantsing might work better for you.

If you are new to writing, I suggest outlining at first, because it will teach you about story structure and plot beats. But be prepared to abandon this technique later when you have a better sense of how to craft a story. (Some never stop plotting, which is okay too.)

For me, I began my writing life as a pantser, then switched to being a plotter, and now I use an amalgam of the two. I usually have a general idea where I want my story to go, but I let the characters guide me (for me, character must always come first). And sometimes, depending on the project, I choose one method over another.

Recently, for example, I was hired to write a story for a new tie-in media project, and they asked me for an outline before I submitted a story. And while my first draft adheres to my outline closely, I’ve found that I need to significantly shift certain things, because as I fleshed out the story, some of the protagonist’s characterization needs further development not included in my original outline.

So, what are you? A pantser? A plotter? Something else? Do you like having an outline to follow, or do you just go where the story leads? I’ll end with this important point: Every person is different and there’s no “correct” way to write a story. Anyone who says otherwise is just trying to sell you something.

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