Last month, I attended a local author event that at one point ventured into a discussion of plotting vs. pantsing. Are you a plotter, who plans ahead and outlines before starting to write, or are you a pantser, who writes by the proverbial seat of your pants?
I’m a planner myself. When I was in college, I wrote meticulous outlines for my term papers, often several pages long, and when I write fiction, I always write with an ending already in mind. Most of my writing now is short, so I don’t usually formally outline, but I do in my head. I know this about myself, so I allot plenty of time for this mental plotting. I can spend hours or days planning the direction for a post, like this one, or arranging the points I want to make, but once the overall argument and order is set, I feel much more comfortable. My internal rule of thumb is once I have moved on from pondering big-picture aspects to formulating sentences in my head, I am now ready to write. At that point, writing is usually relatively fast for me, and then I spend a fair amount of time revising and tweaking the material.
Still, when I say I am a plotter, I don’t mean that I have everything plotted. No matter how detailed my outlines were in college, I often realized a significant point or even a better argument as I was writing the paper that caused me to veer away from the outline in some way. I have talked on here before about how even with considerable planning, a project can take a drastically different turn in the middle of the actual writing process. That’s just how writing works.
In general, though, my advice to writers is not to fight their natural process, as long as it is working. That was my rule of thumb with my Comp I students, so as much as I personally love outlines, I taught them how to use them but didn’t require them to submit outlines for their papers. I introduced students to several different ways to organize/plan their writing and then left it up to their discretion how they applied that knowledge. Usually during the class period when we worked on this lesson, students would find one method worked for them particularly well, while the others didn’t. Sometimes, one of the ways to organize information actively aggravated them. I don’t think this was time wasted in class. Knowing what doesn’t work is just as useful as knowing what does.
Clearly, though, if you are stumped on a project or if you are unable to finish a project, your writing process may not be working. That’s where I come in. My facility with outlines has helped a lot of my editing clients over the years, as we mapped out their manuscripts and identified structural concerns, and my experience as a teacher means I can introduce authors to different methods of organizing their thoughts if what they’re currently doing isn’t working.
The plotting vs. pantsing debate is often limited to fiction writing debates and for good reason. Even if you are a committed pantser by nature, nonfiction manuscripts do generally require planning. In fact, if you want to be traditionally published, you will likely be asked to provide an outline (or annotated table of contents) before you even write the book. If you are self-publishing, you may still need an outline to structure your narrative nonfiction manuscript effectively, especially if you’re using sources and advancing a thesis.
If you are struggling with narrative structure and/or outlining, reach out to me! This is something I can help with as part of either author coaching or a developmental editing, depending on how far along you are in the project.
