A while back, my friend and “Alpha Writer” in our circle of misfits, Aaron, posted about the necessity of plotting, despite the so-called “successful authors” who openly disparage “plotting” and “planned structure.” For the most part, I agreed with his stance. I plot everything out meticulously before I start writing, or at least have a few sentences down for each item on a beat sheet. The reasons for this are myriad, and it builds a process that works pretty well for me. I was going to post a nice affirmation of this, but then I got to thinking:
The question, “Is Plotting for Losers?” doesn’t actually make sense.
Writers, but really Internet people in general, love a good binary. They think everyone needs to be stamped, labeled, and put into an easily identifiable tribe so social media can do its thing of helping us simplify and marginalize what we don’t understand to make it easier for us to turn a simple discussion into a high-stakes WWE smackdown.
So, while I may start a story with bullet points on a beat sheet or a one-page summary of each chapter, that rarely represents the final form of what comes out. My first draft looks a lot like my last draft, only with a few scenes left out or changed, and a lot more typos. I know the reversals, I know the midpoint turn, I know the emotional flow that ends each act, and so forth. When writing, I revise heavily to tighten the structure or cut out redundant ideas, and occasionally I rearrange to improve pacing and impact. This is typical plotter behavior.
Except I realized the reason I can do this now is that my story has been pretty solid in my head for decades. Some scenes and characters can trace their lineage back to a certain ten-year-old kid who had so many action figures from so many different franchises that he gave up trying to reconcile into canon how Buck Rogers would ever meet Luke Skywalker and that Micronaut guy, and decided to rename everything in the toybox, giving a new, original backstory to each playset. That kid didn’t know about beat sheets or a three-act dramatic structure. That was all improvisation through emotion — or what some people call pantsing.
Now, of course, the 80’s gave birth to the “buddy cop” genre, and I fell in love with heist movies and old detective noir. These all got incorporated into what was still just a blob of proto-stories in my teenage head. In college, I got into poetry, Beat literature, and Jungian archetypes. These days, I’m intentionally researching Carnege, à Kempis, and Thomistic philosophy for inspiration. Most importantly, I’ve now learned the names for all the genre tropes I was drawn to as a kid and decided to break, or at least undermine, as a writer. Okay, yeah, that’s a bad guy, but let’s dispense with the twirly mustache and make his story a statement about trauma and the intellectual need for coherence over animalistic instinct. Okay, there’s a big, epic “space war thing” going on, but battle choreography is boring in print, and probably someone has already written a bigger, better war. Let’s tell a personal story about determinism and free will, with something going on in the background — same emotional core; different focus.
So, in my case, the mythology, the characters, and the backstory were definitely pantsed. The stories are definitely plotted. The scenes are often discovered structurally during drafts. The revisions are meticulously engineered. What does that make me, a panster up until the words “Chapter One” are typed? Does anything before the writing process count? I think “planster” is a cop-out term. If it exists, then we’re all plansters. The question is which mode controls which part of the process?
I think the other issue, certainly in my case, is that a “serious author” doesn’t want to admit the childlike origins of “his art.” A good story needs themes, metaphor, foreshadowing, emotional pacing, and dramatic irony. We plotters spend years building that scaffolding and structure around our early instinctive material.
The danger is assuming that scaffolding is the story we’re trying to tell. Yes, I’d love to tell you how the three fates of the three different Hei Gēzis were my metaphorical statement on the “reclamation of fractured identity in a fluid reality,” and to show you the diagrams and references to Sherry Turkle and Carl Jung that inspired this idea. In reality, the original idea owes just as much to the “Great Carpet Compromise of the Summer of 1980,” when it was officially agreed upon that the “Blue Ninja” was cooler than the “Red Ninja,” but definitely wouldn’t win in a fight between the two.
My current idea is that creativity is neither pure imagination nor rigid process. It’s like music. The melody can come from anywhere. Maybe you hummed it in the car, maybe you structured it to fit over a few chords you picked out. Later, you get orchestration, arrangement, and structure. In jazz, musicians can improvise within an arrangement, where an entry and an exit are indicated, but what happens in between is unstructured. In prog rock, bands build entire side-long suites around a melody or motif without inspiration. In classical music, we get variations on a theme, or movements exploring different modes and moods. I don’t think anybody is going to call any of those ideas purely instinct or purely engineered, and I’m starting to think writing is neither pantsed nor plotted.
Many heavily outlined novels feel mechanically dead; plenty of pantsed novels feel meandering and pointless. Maybe Stephen King never wrote an outline in his life, but he’s consumed thousands of stories and certainly knows what a proper story structure is. Maybe Brandon Sanderson puts everything that will happen down on spreadsheets, but no graph or pivot table has ever generated character chemistry or drama. The question is: do you blame or credit your process, or do you admit you already had the story in your subconscious and just used a process to get it on the page?
