In my mid-teens, my mother introduced me to the power of making lists and crossing things off as done. I embraced the concept wholeheartedly, and I guess it's no surprise that when I started writing longer stories, I created outlines consisting of several pages of plot points. It was a few years later that I learned the terms "plotter" and "pantser." A plotter figures out the whole plot before writing anything. A pantser goes by the seat of their pants and doesn't plan anything. Obviously, I was a plotter.
Or was I?
The first time I wrote a novel-length story, I approached it as a plotter. Each plot element was crossed off as I went, and I reached the end. That achievement was certainly worth celebrating, but the novel itself, not so much. As I got to know the characters, they had different ideas of what they wanted to do, and I made the mistake of ignoring what they told me for the first half of the story. The result was a story that felt like it had a split personality. The first half and the second half really didn't work together, and my attempts to patch them together only made things worse. One of these days I might rewrite it. Meanwhile, I've embraced what I learned from that experience. More or less.
The first version of the story "Caffrey Conversation" had an outline that I followed, but there wasn't a lot of detail and I was open to inspiration as I wrote. The only piece I refused to change was the ending. For some reason, I was determined that my prequel not be an AU, and that meant I had to force the characters into the state they were in for the White Collar pilot, completely ignoring the fact that the events in my prequel and changed the characters. The result was an ending that felt forced and contrived. It was a relief to go back a couple of months later to write the alternate ending that let me turn that story into an AU series.
After I wrote "Caffrey Conversation," but before I published it, Mom died. With that, my orderly world felt broken. Perhaps that's why, when I wrote the second story -- "Choirboy Caffrey" -- I didn't have an outline. I had a general idea of what I wanted to happen, and for the first time I went into complete pantser mode. Halfway through writing the story, I still didn't know who was the culprit in the mystery Neal and Peter were investigating. I'd simply planted clues and trusted that they'd figure out something that made sense. I'm still amazed that I actually started posting chapters before I knew the ending.
Then I did the same thing with "By the Book." I knew what was going to happen -- or so I thought. Certain scenes were clear in my mind. And I just started writing. Complications appeared immediately. I'd wanted to write about Neal undercover at a New Year's Eve party, and I created an ally -- retired FBI Agent Thomas Gardiner -- who could get Neal into the party. But if you have a retired agent already invited to the party, why can't he gather the information that Neal's going undercover to get? Time and again, I wrote myself out of these corners and kept going. It was a heady experience.
By the time I reached the end, I had mixed feelings about the pantser approach. On the one hand, I'd written some scenes that readers absolutely loved. On the other hand, the story felt out of balance, as if I'd concluded the case by the mid point and then had to scramble to come up with more things for the characters to do beyond the emotional subplot.
With the ideas for the next stories already semi-formed in my mind, I'd been weaving threads throughout "By the Book" to be tied up in the next stories. It was complex enough that I had concerns about remembering everything.
That's why I went back to creating an outline for "Caffrey Flashback," which I knew was going to be a longer and more complicated story. However, I didn't go with the list of plot points I'd used in my plotter days. Instead, I listed everything I wanted to cover -- from plot points to revelations to lines stuck in my head -- on sticky notes. Then I organized those sticky notes in an order that kind of corresponded to chapters.
As I wrote each chapter, if the sticky note didn't end up fitting where I thought it would, I'd move it to another part of the story or get rid of it. And I added more sticky notes as more ideas popped up so I wouldn't forget them. Then I listened to the characters. Henry started hinting he was gay, and I adjusted my romantic subplot ideas accordingly.
The sticky note approach worked so well, that I did the same thing for "Caffrey Disclosure" and "Caffrey Aloha."
For the novel I'm working on, I nervously went back to an outline, and something in me kept resisting it. Then for NaNoWriMo I took the advice of simply writing without overthinking it. I strayed too far into pure pantser mode in order to meet the word count goals. I hit the 50,000 word mark, but it has been a slog to take that unorganized prose and make it work. If I were to try NaNoWriMo again, I'd set a lower word count goal and spend more time thinking about how the scenes fit together. Then the rewrites wouldn't be so painful.
Another thing I learned from my NaNoWriMo experience is the term "plantser," which means a combination of plotter and pantser. That sounds like where I am now.
Thinking through all of this, I ran some things by Silbrith. She has different steps she takes when planning a story, but also describes herself as a plantser. I think she summed it up beautifully when she said, "so many of my best ideas come only once I've actually started the writing process."
When the writing is flowing and the characters feel real, they reveal things I hadn't considered. New ideas come to mind, and plot holes are uncovered. I think if I were 100% a plotter, that would bother me, but instead I've learned to embrace these in-the-moment discoveries as the most joyful part of writing.
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