The age-old debate among writers: To outline your book or to fly by the seat of your pants. As you can imagine, there are pros and cons to both methods.
Writing into the Unknown
If you’re a “pantser” (a writer who flies by the seat of your pants) you come to a new book not knowing where it’s going to end up. When confronted with the blank page, you ask, “Alright, protagonist…where are you going today?”
You’re allowing your characters to drive the story, and you as the writer are just reporting what they do. The advantage of this method is you potentially get stronger characters. They get to make choices, and by these choices, we get to see who they really are.
One of the disadvantages of pantsing is that your characters might lead you down a rabbit hole. One day while you’re deep in a writing session, you look at your story and realize it’s going nowhere (at least not anywhere you like). Your characters, it seems, didn’t have any interesting plans for the last fifty pages or so. This means you’ll end up cutting a ton of material. Countless hours of work in the trash. Ugh!
Of course, cutting and trashing is a part of editing. But outlining could help you avoid creating large chunks of material that were never meant to be in your story in the first place.
Planning the Journey Ahead
When outliners (or plotters) come to the blank page, they tend to start working on the big picture of the story. Outliners begin with (you guessed it) outlines. They lay out the map and plan out the journey before their characters set foot on the road. When writers know where they’re going, it’s less likely they’ll write themselves into a rabbit hole. So the big advantage of outlining is that can save you time in the long run.
The major disadvantage of outlining is that you run the risk of making your characters mere puppets of the plot. And you, the writer, are pulling their strings.
Why did the protagonist run into that jungle of death when they could have taken that easier path through the meadow? If your answer is, “Because the story needed him to go there,” then your character wasn’t free to be himself. You were controlling him. And that makes him a weak character. A common casualty in outlining.
Are You a Pantser or a Plotter?
As I said before, there are pros and cons to both pantsing and outlining. Different authors follow different strategies. Stephen King is a devout pantser. Brandon Sanderson is an outliner. But I would argue that no writer is 100% pantser or 100% outliner. Pantsing and outlining sit on a spectrum and authors tend to lean more towards one side or the other.
I lean more towards outlining since I come to the blank page with a story idea. (And I hate writing myself into rabbit holes. Been there, done that. Don’t need to go back.) As one author argues, my preference here probably has to do with my personality type. Some writers’ personalities might make them more inclined towards pantsing.
As an outliner, here’s what I’ve done. In order to avoid the common pitfall that often comes with outlining (creating weak characters), I like to bring my characters with me to the outlining process. I ask, “What would you do in this situation?” And when it comes to writing the first draft, the characters also have a say in what happens.
So that’s a possible approach to writing a book. But what about a series?
In my opinion, I’d suggest you outline your series. But of course I’d suggest that–I’m an outliner. That’s how I’m wired, and it’s hard for me to imagine how I could start a series with no idea of where it’s going.
That said, I would encourage a writer to hold their series outline with an open hand. Allow–and expect–things to change in the story. The pros and cons of outlining only grow more pronounced as you make the story longer. Or turn it into a series.
Pantsing a series could potentially get you into a rabbit hole three books deep. Outlining your trilogy could help you arrive at an ending that pleases you. And since you know where the story is going, you can entice your readers with foreshadowing (i.e. a significant person or place in book two casually mentioned in book one).
But if you rely too heavily on an outline for your series, you leave little room for your characters to make choices. And it’s very hard to see who they’ll become over the course of many books. The transformation your protagonist makes by the end of book one might change the entire direction of book two.
In my experience, approaching the blank page involves a little bit of pantsing and a little bit of outlining. A sometimes elegant, sometimes clumsy dance of the two.
Following one strategy over the other isn’t a matter of right or wrong. It’s a matter of learning what strategy will serve you best.
What does your writing strategy look like? Are you an outliner or a pantser?
Share in the comments below.
The King of Pantsers, I do it because it makes my story more heartfelt and tangible.
I feel that, if I were to outline, my outline would change more often than I change my shorts. Certainly, there are people who can script their lives; go to the best school, marry the prettiest girl, have three kids, build a tree fort, but my guess is, this script is going to change. As is life, such is a story. Stuff happens! I never was pantsed, but I was witness to many of them, and numerous other embarrassments through high school.
I would say I’m 70% pantser, 30% outliner. I am quite unpredictable person myself, and I don’t like to plan my life. Maybe it’s coming from that. I’ll check out that other article link avout6 pantsers right now.
I tried pantsing, grasping the spirit of the moment, being true to the idea. I wasted months, perhaps years of work that way. I published a 129,000-word novel (A Perfect Blindness if you have to know), and I cut about 80,000 words out over several drafts of deadwood, meaningless side plots, and contradictory passages. I am now fixing over 200 pages of a World Bible to avoid that, yet, I’ve found that I kept riffing on the idea in one file, only to forget about it, then riff on the same idea, again and again, producing contradictory storylines, events and histories, and worst of all, losing critical work because I had no idea where I’d gone off on a tear, following my instincts. I eschew pantsing utterly for wasting so much of my life. NOW, within a chapter, really scene I go off. whatever way the writing takes me. It’s like limited infinity, which is what calculus uses when describing the volume under a curve. The curve limits the space, but there is an infinity underneath. Just as when I have specific goals/outcomes for a chapter or scene, which limits where I’m going, I still have that limited infinity in which to create. I am a dedicated plotter now.
I tend to be a mixture of the two. I often come to write with no idea where the story will take me, and like a pantser, I allow my characters to make choices. Once a character makes a choice and I have some idea where the story is going, I outline it and write it down.