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?
