Plotter or Pantser (or: The Book I'll Never Finish)

Today I get to sign off of 2020 on behalf of the Novel Points of View team — and I don’t imagine there are many people who aren’t glad to to see it go, even though there's a possibility 2021 is sitting round the corner sharpening its claws. 

Still, every cloud has a silver lining, or so they say, and one of the very small ones for me is a lesson I learned about my writing. I discovered the definitive answer to that old writer’s question: was I a plotter or a pantser? (A pantser, if you don’t know is a writer who flies by the seat of their pants — no plot, no characters, no structure.) 

Once upon a time I would have said I was neither. Over my lifetime I’ve plotted more and more and these days I would definitely call myself a plotter. But once upon a time I believed in letting a story tell itself and editing it afterwards. 

This year I tested that theory and discovered it wanting. It began with NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, where writers are encouraged to produce the first draft of a novel/50,000 words during November. I’m a regular NaNo participant. It suits me. I write to a plan. But this year 2020 made it difficult. I’d rather lost my writing mojo and was stuck at about 24k words in a draft. So I took on NaNoWriMo to help me finish it. 

Well, I finished -- but the book came in at around 70k words and that left me some 6000 words short. Rather than not complete the challenge, I did what I’ve never done before. I opened a new document and began, with no ideas, to write. 

No ideas. No plot. No character. No location. The first day I wrote a thousand words. It was easy. The second day I did the same, sitting down with no idea of what I was going to write.and I wrote… Easy. The third, fourth, fifth days…the same. I completed my numbers. And when I read it back I was pretty impressed with its coherence and even with the couple of twists and teasers I’d managed to put in.

And then I stopped. Because the reason I’m not a pantser is nothing to do with writing actual words. Everything I produced was superficial. I’ve learned that, for me, planning isn’t about knowing what’s going to happen but about becoming engaged with the characters and I have no desire to carry on the journey with Tara (whose husband has just in a car accident in France in the company of another woman when she thought he was away on business in London) and her best friend Zoe (who was secretly in love with the husband). I wasn’t even interested in the handsome Frenchman who’d just rolled up on Tara’s doorstep with a small child in tow. 

I may go back to these characters, in time, but not until I know who they are and what they’re doing. Not, in other words, until I have a plot…