Why I Went From 'Pantsing' To Plotting My Novels

Photo by Patrick Perkins on Unsplash.

When writers meet each other for the first time, one of the questions we love to ask each other is: ‘Are you a pantser or a plotter?’. Readers are often curious about this too.

‘Pantsers’, as the name implies, ‘Fly by the seat of their pants’. They write without a plan and discover the story as they go.

Plotters, on the other hand, plan their story out in great detail before they commence writing.

There are different degrees of pantsing and plotting

Some pantsers write out a beginning, middle and end for their story on a table napkin in a restaurant, or they may already have extensive personal knowledge about the setting of the book. There are also different degrees and methods of plotting. Some authors fill notebooks with copious notes, while others may lay out an entire wall of their house with different coloured Post-it notes to plot their stories, and yet others may use special software to mark out every character detail and plot point.

I started my writing career as a pantser. When I wrote White Gardenia, I had no idea how to write a book. I simply started and kept going intuitively until I reached the end. What strikes me as interesting now is that White Gardenia is very clearly a journey novel. When I was writing it, I was working in New York for an international conference company. My job involved a lot of travel and not much free time. So White Gardenia was researched and written in snatches – on planes, in airports, and in hotel rooms.

The story travels from Harbin in China in the 1940s, to Shanghai, to the Philippines, to Australia, and ends in Russia in the 1960s. Anya, the protagonist, meets a large cast of characters along the way. Some stay for less than a chapter while others disappear and reappear in the story. It very much reflects how I was living at the time – meeting people in different countries before moving on, having fleeting romances, taking in new sights, and constantly having to adapt to new environments.

I completely rewrote the book before submitting it to a publisher and even after that there was extensive editing

When the book was published, it was a great success and it has been translated into many languages. But the editing process was unwieldy. I completely rewrote the book before submitting it to a publisher and even after that there was extensive editing, involving the writing of new material and combining some of the minor characters into a single character who could perform several roles in the book.

I’m not sorry I wrote White Gardenia the way I did. It takes a lot of determination and discipline to write a book from beginning to end, and I learned a lot from both my missteps and my triumphs. If someone had told me I needed to do a lot of plotting beforehand in order to write a good story, I might have been too intimidated to even start.

But once I became a professional writer, it became apparent that pantsing was creating a lot of extra work in the editing process. I recognised that plotting my books beforehand would probably be a better (and saner) method for writing novels now I had looming deadlines. However, things did not always go to plan (pun intended!). Although I did make some attempts to plot out my novels, I found as soon as I started writing, my characters would take over and any plotting I had attempted to do went out the door. So what was the point?

It was actually the Covid-19 lockdown in 2020 that changed things for me

I decided to use my time stuck at home constructively by taking online masterclasses in film and television screenwriting with Karel Segers of the Story Department. What struck me about the course was how much meticulous planning screenwriters put into scripts before they even type the title page of the story.

There are several reasons for this. Unlike books, where readers can take as long as they want to complete a novel, screenplays are restricted by time. Most films run from 80 to 120 minutes long (unless they are French and you don’t mind watching a four hour long film about someone painting a wall!). Commercial television has to take into account ad breaks, and television episodes in a series usually run around the 45 minute mark.

Films and television shows are also far more expensive to produce than books, so every scene and character must count. Also the way we view drama comes with a sort of intuitive expectation of how a story plays out in regards to turning points, set-backs, climaxes and resolutions.

Because I like challenging myself, I set a goal of planning my new novel with as much discipline as screenwriter. I wrote out extensive backstories for my main characters and spent a few months writing a ‘step outline’, where I wrote down every scene for my novel in order, including brief descriptions of the setting, character interactions and snippets of dialogue if they came to me. This meant I had pictured my story clearly from beginning to end.

It made me nervous to be spending so long thinking out my novel before starting to write it. I only have a certain amount of time between writing books, and it did take a lot of determination to keep plotting the novel and resist the urge to start writing it.

But I’m so glad I did stay the course, because I found so many advantages in working this way. To name a few:

💗 I didn’t waste time researching topics that weren’t going to be relevant to the story

💗 I could share the outline with my publisher and agent before I started writing. My publisher actually made a suggestion for a major change that was easy to make in the step outline. It would have been a lot harder to make if the novel was already finished.

💗 I could write out of chronological order if I needed to. In my past novels, because I was telling the story from beginning to end, I couldn’t jump all over the place when writing. I even wrote my stories that have past-present storylines in strict order. By having a plan, I could work on a later chapter while waiting for research material for an earlier chapter to arrive. I could also spend my energy writing the big scenes first and then go back to writing calmer ones.

💗 The stress of wondering what to write each day was eliminated. It was already worked out in the plan.

Sometimes pantsers ask plotters if having a plan for their story stifles their creativity in any way

On the contrary, I found having a plan allowed me to be more creative because I could stay focussed on bringing out the details of each scene rather than wondering what was going to happen next.

My new novel will be out in September 2022. I don’t have a title for it yet. We usually decide on that once the editing is done! But I’ll be sharing more about it next year, so be sure to follow me on:

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