Plotters Versus Pantsers

Which are you?

Photo by charlesdeluvio on Unsplash

Enter a room of writers and raise the issue of plotters versus pantsers, and you may also raise people’s temperatures.

Some authors plot every point in minute detail, so that when they come to write the story they have a good idea of what will happen in each scene. This prevents dead ends, and helps authors to get words written, because they always know what they are going to write. This is plotting, or outlining.

Other authors prefer to let a story flow and make it up as they go along, asking “What if … ?” and creating new scenes out of how the characters react to events. This is known as pantsing – “flying by the seat of their pants” (an idiom meaning “playing it by ear”). The characters drive the story. It can lead to exciting and unexpected twists for the author and reader, or it can lead to wasted time and dead ends and more need for rewriting. Note that for pantsing to work, you have to already visualise strong and believable characters and interesting situations for them to exist in. Some authors refer to this as discovery writing.

So, are you a plotter or a pantser? Think about your process for a moment before answering.

Or maybe you are both?