Are You a Plotter? Pantser? Plotser???
I always imagined myself a plotter. I’m a planner by nature, and manage lots of projects and an extensive calendar in my day job. However, when I started working on book 1 of my dystopian sci-fi trilogy (Project: T.A.G.), a funny thing happened: Despite having a very extensive outline, I found that some of my characters were dictating the action.
I’d get to a point where I wasn’t 100% sure what would happen next or how the next thing would happen and I’d ask myself, What would this character do? It was never the major plot points. It was the stuff in between. And the things my characters decided to do always made my story better.
It was after this had happened numerous times that I read How to Write a Mystery and Robert Lopresti’s contribution about the Rising Island method. Here’s how he describes it:
After I read that, I was like, that’s me. That’s how I write. I plan out all the big tentpole events, but there’s some organic pantser action happening in between.
The Third Way
Perhaps it’s time to do away with the plotter-pantser binary and add a new in-between category: the plotser.
That rolls off the tongue more nicely than rising-islander. (Sorry, Robert.)
Where are my fellow plotsers?
Related posts:
Book review: ‘How to Write a Mystery’ by Mystery Writers of America
This vs. that: Novel-writing books
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