The thought of a whiteboard covered in character notes and plot points curdles my blood – but not as much as it once did.
In writing circles, I am what’s known as a ‘pantser’ – that is, I like to write by the seat of my pants and see what happens, rather than know every twist and character trait before I write word one. That, to me, is too much like filling out a form or completing my annual performance review. Pantsers get off on the sense of adventure; discovering the storyline as their characters do.
I was, in my early years, a fundamentalist pantser, but as I’ve matured come to see the value of a proper outline. It minimises the need for major rewrites – my early stories and novels always had gaping plot holes – and can clarify a story’s themes, which in turn can influence and improve the plot. I suppose you could say I got sick of making extra work for myself in the name of fun. God knows, the rewriting and editing process is already time consuming enough.
Plotting can also ensure a novel goes out into the world looking its best. Two novels that could have been improved with some additional plotting are The Body Snatchers by Jack Finney and Horns by Joe Hill.
The Body Snatchers is an unmitigated masterpiece of paranoid horror for about 200 pages… right up to the point where Finney quite clearly runs out of ideas. The problem, I suspect, was that he ‘pantsed’ his protagonists into an unwinnable situation, then sat back and said to himself: “Hmm, I can’t very well have the pod people take over the earth, but based on what has happened up to now, my heroes’ situation is completely hopeless. To fix that, I’d have to rewrite half the novel – bugger that for a joke. Oh well, ludicrous deus ex machina it is, then.”
Hill’s novel has a similar problem, although it arises in a different fashion. Horns boasts a terrific concept – a young man wakes up to find two devil horns growing from his forehead, which imbue him with dark powers – but it’s abundantly clear that Hill chose not to plot, because the anti-hero, Ignatius Perrish, begins to drift from place to place without purpose, and the storyline drifts right along with him. I’ve occasionally let a short story lead me by the nose, but I’ve always had at least some notion of where my novels would end up. Literary authors, who often kick plot well down the list of priorities, could get away with such meandering*, but Horns is genre fiction (despite any pretence to the contrary), and it’s all too obvious when it begins to lose focus.
My own aversion to plotting appears to stem from an intense dislike of heavily plotted novels. Hell for me would be a book store that only featured a ‘crime’ section. So I’ll always be a pantser to some degree. But what made me a more moderate pantser was my story ‘Old Secrets’. In it, a woman who can teleport things from other dimensions begins to lose her mind... and control over what she brings into our world. The story appeared in Midnight Echo #2 back in 2009, but prior to that the editor of Apex Digest, Deb Taber, rejected it and offered this critique: “There didn’t really seem to be a coherent feel to the types of people/things Ginny brought through, which made the overall story less believable to me.”
At the time I dismissed it out of hand. She has dementia, you idiot, I thought. Of course there’s no rhyme or reason to the things she brings through. But Taber was right, and man, what I wouldn’t give to wind back the clock and have another crack at it before publication. Five minutes’ thought given to the nature of the things that manifest from Ginny’s mind – five minutes of plotting – would have turned a good story into a brilliant story.
* The irony is, of course, that most literary authors are obsessive about all other facets of their work, and so take years to complete even a short book.