#AmWriting – Planning Your Pants

Writing is a planned process, with a detailed outline of the story ready before the writer begins.

Writing is a creative burst, inspired in the moment and created on the fly.

Does one of those descriptions speak to you more than the other? If you approach your work through the first example you are a “planner”. If the second, you are a “pantser”. The first is obvious to most people (a planner has a plan, right?), but the second puzzles some. A pantser is someone who creates “by the seat of their pants”. Hence, “pantser”.

Which am I? I’ll tell you in a minute.

This difference in approach is a dividing issue for some writers. Yesterday I read a tweet from a writer who wished they knew in advance if a writer were a pantser because they would avoid their work on that basis. Everyone has an opinion, but I think this is dumb. It’s an irrational bias and one that I find astonishing in a writer.

The plan vs pants divide discusses where writers BEGIN the process. Do they begin with a careful plan or do they dive into the work and go? It has nothing to do with the quality of the final project, per se. Some planned stories have struck me as wooden, and overly detailed. Some pantser stories have been wonderful, intricate, brilliant stories. And vice versa. A writer’s process only matters as it relates to the final product. A poor writer will be a poor writer no matter which camp they find themselves. And the good writer will create a good final product no matter how they begin.

What the twitterer mentioned above needs to remember is that no matter how you begin, there’s a process that all good writing passes through. The revision/editing process. Finish the first draft, but you’re not done. There is so much more to go. Have we answered all the questions of the story, are our characters fully developed, have we ordered the story to its best advantage, are there gaps that need filling, are there details/characters/plotlines that need elimination? How well this part of the creative process proceeds is far more important than how we begin that process.

Think about it this way – how the creative process of the story began is invisible to a large degree when you read the final product. The quality of that revision/editing process is all too visible. So which is more important?

Like so many things about writing, I put the question of pants/plan in the category of “personal choice”. Do what works for you.

So what works for me? For most of my writing, I’m a pantser (so that one person will now swear to never read anything I create, lol!). The reality is that after I have run through the initial creative surge of a story, there is an element of planning that I use to begin the revise/edit phase. For one of my WIPs in particular, I am working much more on the planner side of the fence. So I’m a third category, a hybrid. I have no evidence to support this, but I’d bet that there are a lot more people who are a hybrid of some degree.

In the end, it doesn’t matter. Not one little bit.

The only thing that matters is that final product.

Peace.