Are You an Explorer, Finisher, or Sharer?
Not to surprise you, but I’m big on process as a writer. I’m constantly trying to enhance and refine my skills in as many areas of writing as I can and weave them into how I approach a project. I take a holistic approach to my works: prose, plot, character, and structure are all important to me in a book, no one necessarily more important than another.
In other words, I’m a finisher. What motivates me is making a complex story with high quality in as many facets as I can manage. I constantly want to do better than I did on the last project, and each project has to be of a particular holistic quality before I feel ready to finish it, release it, or let others see it at all.
That’s not to say I’m terribly focused. It’s rare for me not to visit a number of projects over the course of a month. It’s also rare for me to go a whole month without starting something new. Part of this is a commitment to exploration—I know I won’t finish everything I start, but increasingly I find value in noodling around in a world that doesn’t go anywhere. I learn a lot about what’s interesting me about even dead-ended environment.
Which raises the question: What motivates us to write? What keeps you coming back to the page on an individual level? What is the point of hitting the same keys over and over to produce a story for you? Is it to explore a character or a world? Is there self-satisfaction in having told a story in its entirety, start to finish? Is there glory in showing people what you wrote that makes putting letters down an easier commitment?
I think the answer is usually complicated, never just one thing. But I do think we likely have a primary motivation in mind that outstrips the others, and that primary motivation may contribute to whether or not we as writers thrive as plotters or pantsers.
Motivations are far more useful as a metric for understanding your process of writing than either “plotter” or “pantser,” too. To ask it again:
What motivates your writing? Are you primarily an Explorer, a Finisher, or a Sharer?
Talking to friends in the Craft Corner Discord—thanks Smarsh and Wrm for hashing this out with me!—we broke into discussion over a meme about how imagining a scene in our heads is more accessible than actually writing it down, and can sometimes demotivate us from the actual action of writing. Sometimes the act of writing creates an almost material barrier: we see the words and they aren’t conveying the scene correctly as we imagined it, and this stops us actually bringing the ideas to fruition on the page. Our imaginations suffer no such limitations of language or skill.
Live footage of the writer trying to transcribe an image held in imagination.
If your motive for writing is exploration, daydreaming is especially dangerous as a barrier to writing. If you imagine the end of the scene in your head—why bother writing it down? For some Explorers, getting the words down may be the only way to understand what happens in the world, where the act of writing is the only thing that develops an idea. That excitement, for explorers, is worth pursuing on its own merit.
Explorers may be most consistent with the Pantsing archetype—they may be less concerned with things like structure and outlines. Paying too much attention to these things at the jump might de-motivate Explorers to actually write the story—as might daydreaming, killing the excitement inherent in writing. The idea’s already been followed through to its end in an outline or a daydream—what, then, is the point of writing it?
On the other hand, if your motive for writing is getting to the complete, finished story—the satisfaction of having crafted every element, its beginning and end, its peaks and valleys, its characters, its structure and prose—outlining might be advantageous to keeping you writing.
I’m learning this as a former pantser who’s forced themselves into becoming an outliner. I want the process, the craft, the satisfaction of the rounded body. Right now I’m having a ton of starts and stops in all of my projects—a lot of wiping and resetting—because some element of what I’m writing isn’t working and doesn’t give the feeling that the story is holistically complete. Outlines, especially in scrivener mode, help me feel like the exploration part of the story is out of the way so I can focus on the craft elements like structure, prose, and emotional beats, which keeps me plugging along at developing that holistic feeling.
Sharers, meanwhile, are keenest to show their creation to someone else. I think sharers may be all over the map in terms of their planner/pantser alignment, but the main reason to keep hitting keys is because more words mean there’s more to share.
Sharing is the motivation I relate to the least—I generally prefer to think of my work as something absorbed into a reader’s wider storytelling mosaic, less dealt with on an individual basis—but whether sharing helps or hinders at certain stages of a story’s development might depend on what facet of it a writer is most excited to show off.
Figuring out what motivates you as a writer might be one way to help overcome a block. If you’re a Sharer and you haven’t gotten feedback on your work lately, sharing a snippet might give you the energy you need to write more. If you’re an Explorer and you feel like there’s nothing left to explore, the excavation involved in the act of writing might help you push through. And if you, like me, are a Finisher—I daydream constantly about the world of my story. Sometimes those details give a new layer, a new depth that the story didn’t previously have.
On the other hand, daydream might be anathema to some Explorers if daydreams explore the story in and of itself and demotivates writing. Daydream might also be just unhelpful to Sharers, since there’s no way to show others what’s in your head. What kills your motivation might be equally important to understanding your process. Consider writing as a behavior: why express the behavior? What stops you from doing it? These questions could be incredibly helpful to achieving your writing goals.
If nothing’s working when it comes to your primary writing motivation—figure out what your secondary motivation is, if any. I’m a Finisher, but exploration is still important to me. Lots of exploration happens in the outline phase, but some comes later as I’m drafting and redrafting as well. Engaging in the process of writing is often the only way I can figure out all the details of a story, and knowing that is part of what brings me back to the page. I stall out near the ~65% completion mark of any project, because those moments of exploration are so few and far between after that point; but while exploration is important and sometimes will lead me to noodle around in a project I know won’t go anywhere, exploration alone doesn’t get my works to finished anymore. Reminding myself of my Finisher motivations helps me get through the lull—there’s lots of craft yet to come, even if there’s nothing more to discover about the story.
There are all kinds of motivations that keep us writing. Like any personality test, these are just archetypes. Throw some more at me! What motivates you?
In the meanwhile, you’ve been reading OUT OF CHARACTER. Let’s put something on the page, for one reason or another.