Of Plots and Pants

A few years ago, I went on a writers podcast hoping to promote my chapbook of poems and, more generally, to talk about writing. The discussion was billed as being about poetry, memoir, and grief.

As I remember it, just before we started taping our discussion, Liz Bullard, the podcaster, asked me a question that was meant to tell her a little bit about me and, perhaps, get us thinking about writing.

“Are you a plotter or a pantser?” she asked.

I had two simultaneous reactions. First, the question made her sound more like a popular novelist than someone there to talk about poetry. And second, I didn’t use those terms. Though I had heard them often enough at writers conferences, I had never really thought of my writing process that way. I remember pausing before I admitted to being both. Or I think I said that I was 70% pantser. I can’t be sure as that part of our discussion wasn’t recorded.

At any rate, in answering her question in this way, I felt dishonest. Plotter vs. Pantser is one catchy way to get people involved in identifying themselves, putting themselves on the writing map, as it were, as we might identify as introverts or Sagittarians. They are almost entirely self-explanatory, and like all cliches, god-terms, and devil-terms, they build instant community among all who endorse them. But as I said, I didn’t and still don’t think in these terms about my writing process. They don’t go very far in supporting a good analysis. And like all binaries, they don’t usually hold up.

Plotters, according to most who talk about it, are writers who will plot their story before they begin drafting a word. I know people like this. One friend is working on her fourth mystery novel, and before she writes, she has to plot everything out in advance. She needs to know where her story is going.

At one writers party I attended in a coffee shop before the pandemic, while the rest of us were free writing to shared prompts, this friend had an organizer and was outlining the book she was working on. She refused to free write.

It’s worth adding that the word “plot” doesn’t just concern coming up with the events that happen. It also concerns the particular order in which an author chooses to arrange those events and how they might use focus and flashbacks and so forth. Plot as arrangement is of interest to both fiction writers and memoirists. When we start plotting, at some point, we might need to ask, “What should be the order in which my story is told?” Should it be chronological—that is, from birth to death? Or should I start in middle age, flash back to childhood, and skip death altogether?

This makes plotting potentially a lot of fun, I think, and there are other possibilities, certainly. But these two choices alone, chronological or what Aristotle would call in media res, represent the potential for vastly different emotional story arcs. Most memoirists do like to follow the novelists (excepting Dickens’ David Copperfield) and begin in middle age. Also, the possibility remains that discovering which arc to take might not be apparent until well into a second draft.

In contrast to this first group, the second, pantsers, will usually, with very little to no planning, just start writing. Rather than inventing content first, a pantser will discover meaning and content by drafting. This means that for them, drafting is actually a form of invention.

E.L. Doctorow is quoted as having once said, “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way” (cited from The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor, archived Sep 8,2008).

This sounds suspiciously like the metaphor of a writer who is probably to some degree a pantser.

J.R.R. Tolkien, in the introduction to the Lord of the Rings edition I read in high school when he was still alive, wrote of his work, “This is a tale that grew in the telling.”

The whole “tale grew in the telling” business I have come to suspect as representing more than just an ear for alliteration. There has to be at least some pantsing going on here also.

Pantsers are writers who are comfortable with the idea that as they write, they will discover more of what they have to say. It will all come organically. And if it doesn’t? I don’t know. Perhaps the writing was worth it for discoveries they made.

There are healthy aspects to both and there are hazards. The plotter knows exactly the next step to take and can come to each writing session knowing exactly what to write. The pantser does not have this under control and may have to write for pages, sometimes hundreds of pages, before really learning how to shape the story.

On the other hand, plotters, if they stick too much to the outline, might miss out on some major epiphanies about what they are doing. If they allow the discoveries that inevitably come with drafting a story, then they are good and will have themselves a story that seems alive. If they don’t, if they refuse to do new outlines, well, that’s a problem.

Drafting, especially the first draft, always is still seeded by the invention stage that preceded it. It is always an open case that could go any number of ways.

When my mystery writer friend begins a second or third draft, she makes new outlines, sometimes cutting out whole subplots from her earlier outlines that she thought were going to be integral to her storyline.

What this plotter/pantser binary really turns out to be is a way of talking about the beginning of a writing project—and also the first two stages of a writing process, invention and drafting. One way to reword the question (and make it less catchy) would be to ask, “Do you do a lot of inventing, or do you just start in drafting a story?”

When put that way, it would seem that anyone would benefit from planning first. It would be good to know where the story is headed. Invention matters.

But I think there is also hidden in the binary a truth about human nature. Some writers simply are by nature pantsers. They really have to write for a while before they begin to get a sense of where they’re going. Perhaps this is because they are feelers before they are thinkers, experiencers before they are analyzers. Meaning emerges from experience or as they experience. Perhaps for them, any form of outlines or lists or notebooks will not be generative, though it certainly would be good for them to practice notetaking and analysis and thinking.

This is why, though I value the canon of invention, I resist arguing that one way is better than the other. I wish I could say that plotters write better first drafts than pantsers do, or that they finish more books than pantsers do. But I don’t think this is true. The binary is not finally about the quality of a writer. It is about individual preferences deeply ingrained in the way that we have experienced our lives.

What I can say with some real certainty is that pantsers, that is, the drafters among us, will eventually have to do some inventing, or rearranging before they finish a project. If they begin with drafting, they will sooner or later, if they stay with it, include some invention.

It may have appeared throughout this post that I have taken the objective middle ground, siding with neither plotters nor their less fortunately named compadres the pantsers, though I think it is obvious that I have offered more examples of pantsers than plotters. I think it is true that no matter how objective I try to be, I am, nevertheless, an old pantser. I get an idea, I write a few things down about the idea, and when I get a good sense of a character in a scene, I will begin writing the scene because I think I have a bias that plot emerges from character. But I am also a pantser who has learned to make adjustments.

Here are a few examples. For the most part, how I approach a writing task depends on what I am writing. If the project is one I am familiar with, say a short essay, I will start with a general notion of the ground I will cover and, if relevant, secondary sources I will use. I start writing without too much invention because in a short essay, like this one, so much will appear around the corner of each paragraph as I am finishing it.

The various forms that an essay can take, as well as different kinds of argumentation, are familiar to me, and the shortness of the form makes them manageable.

For the longer stuff, I usually have to begin with an outline that actually looks more like a grocery list. In the textbook I wrote for first year writing, I started with the shape of the book—I pretentiously fancied I was going to follow the Greek philosopher Aritstotle in beginning with invention and only discussing style and arrangement later. I guess, then, I could say that I started with a grocery list that I’d gotten from reading Aristotle’s Rhetoric. The grocery list and my familiarity with the model text I was following helped me along the way.

For the novel I wrote, I thought in terms of the three act structure of Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s journey. I grouped the incidents happening in the book into three general acts and around inciting incident and climactic scene. One trouble for me was that the dramatic climax of the book, which involved gunfire, did not happen simultaneously with the major emotional understanding the main character experiences when he realizes that he was not, as a boy, responsible for his older brother’s death. The emotional understanding came first, out of another subplot, and it came chapters before the fight at the Catholic Retreat center.

I’m still learning to arrange things.

I know this started out being dismissive of this whole binary. As thinking goes generally, I don’t like using binaries. They oversimplify. I hope this approach today did push things a bit more.

Thank you for reading. I hope that the new year is full of promise for you, and that, unlike me, you have continued to fulfill your New Year’s resolutions.