Beyond Plotting vs Pantsing (to Plot-Plotting vs Pants-Plotting
On why there's more to plotting than simply plotting...
“A pantser is a writer who works without an outline, a term derived from the concept of writing by the seat of your pants. It stands in contrast to a plotter who is someone who outlines their work to a greater or lesser extent.” — selfpublishing.com
Plotting versus pantsing is a useful distinction, but I think it’s important to remember that there’s more to plotting than simply coming up with a plot. And I’m not talking here about the hybrid approach that I, and others, sometimes take, where you have a rough outline of the overall plot, but within that, you pants your way from waypoint to waypoint.
No, what I’m referring to here is the process of coming up with your plot outline. I usually record my outline in a particular spreadsheet form (which I described in an earlier post, How I Plot Novels). The question I want to talk about here, is how does one come up with that plot?
And here, there are two distinct approaches you can take.
The first is top-down. You consider the overall themes you want to address, you consider the overall story idea that you might have, and then you try to work out how your narrative can get from a starting A to your ending Z, and what twists and turns will appear on the way.
The other is bottom-up. You think of a scene that will start your story and put that into your outline / spreadsheet. And then you think, okay, what should happen next? How will my protagonist react to the events of that starting scene? How will it make them feel? What will they now feel compelled to do? And why did that scene happen? What will others be doing?
What sort of scene do I want to follow this? If this was slow and talky, then maybe the next scene needs to have a bit of action, throw in a curveball that will put my protagonist off-guard.
And then maybe you’ll find an idea for the next scene just appearing in your mind, in a way that it wouldn’t, had you been attacking the problem from the top down.
And repeat, from scene to scene…
It’s kind of like pantsing your outline, if that makes sense.
I tend to start top-down, and only break out the spreadsheet template when I’ve worked out my overall plot. But if I get stuff on that overall plot, I find that hitting the spreadsheet with a starting scene can be very helpful.
I guess the obvious point I’m stating is that in plotting, as with life, there’s more than one way to skin a cat, and that if attacking a problem head-on doesn’t work, try outflanking it.
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