“a pile of RAM” by Blake Patterson. Used under CC-BY-2.0
In the great debate of pantsing versus plotting, I’ve always considered myself a pantser. I like to come up witht he basics of a character, world, or situation, throw it down on paper, and see where it goes.
Except that hasn’t worked well for me lately.
I’ve found that if I start a story without an idea of where it goes, it meanders. This is fine! It’s how it’s always gone. But I often burn out on writing it before the meandering gets where it’s going. It’s like I can’t hold the whole thing in RAM at once before it’s optimized. Either I need to know where the story’s going, so I can minimize brain-space intensive meandering, or it needs to be short. If not? It’s not getting done.
It didn’t used to be this way. I wrote the first draft of the novel I’m working on by pretty much meandering through it with characters I loved and then cutting/optimizing from there. I wrote a whole other novel with the same approach, plus the guiding question of “how would I write a book in the vein of Tam MacNeil’s books?” I’ve finished short stories via a good meander. It tends to produce a lot of scraps I can’t use, but I still had finished stuff out of the process.
Lately, it’s been the opposite. All I have is scraps. Stories that get one or two scenes in, and get abandoned. Maybe they make it a few thousand words. Normally I’d dismiss it as “oh I guess this story wasn’t ready to happen,” but I don’t think I’ve written a truly finished story in months, except for the novel revision. So maybe it’s time for me to try something different. Maybe it’s time for me to optimize. To give outlining another try. Or use another technique.
I don’t want a writing practice with only scraps and nothing finished to show for it. So now I guess I just need to figure out a new way to go about things and give it a shot.
Any suggestions?
You could try a hybrid approach? I find what works for me is knowing a few key points in the story (the beginning, the ending, a twist or two) and then getting to each point by pansting it. Then while writing I’ll figure a few more scenes that need to go between each point, because cause and effect. Gradually the outline fills out and the plot points you need to connect become smaller and smaller (Kind of like a hash table?).
Sometimes I need to throw out parts of the outline, because things I’ve pantsed mean they change, but usually at least the major key points stay the same.
And Tam’s stories are SO GOOD. Not a bad way to look at structure 😉