On plotters & pantsers and why the designation no longer matters by the second draft

I’ve had a writing epiphany and I think this one is a game changer. 

Back in December, I started adapting my plays Polar Twilight and New Year’s Thieve as a MG novel. The first draft came very easily and it was pretty put together and I thought I’d be able to clean it up and shop it by the end of Spring. But as I started cleaning it up, something weird happened. A minor character went rouge and started taking over. This character appears in both plays but has the smallest role of the character that do, though I always had a lot more in my head about her. I started reworking the entire plot to center more around her and then eventually made her a second POV. Then the world of the book just kept expanding and I ended having four different POVs in two different time periods, wrote 3 completely new drafts of the first half of the book and then had to stop working on it for a while because I was overwhelmed by the mess I’d made.

I finally realized that the lesson for this book was the exact opposite of the one I needed to learn for Mistress Novel. With that novel, I was holding too much back for sequels that might never happen and the book was suffering for it. With this in mind, I went into this book trying to “kitchen sink,” as it were, and put everything in there. I finally realized that I need to slow the heck down and tell one story at a time instead of four at once, even if the final shape of the book ultimately IS all four woven together. I decided to focus just on the one breakout character, since she’s the one I hear the most strongly, and just write her story for now without worrying about where that fits into the novel I originally started writing. Her story, it turns out, is surprisingly novel shaped on its own and could fit nicely right before the story I was originally trying to tell but it may well still become part of a bigger whole.

Which brings me to the next thing. I realized I need to start changing not just what I’m writing for this novel but HOW. Namely, I realized I’d been wasting a lot of precious writing time by not forcing myself to get more organized.

Keep in mind that an outline doesn’t have to look anything like this. It’s just a plan for going forward.

In the break I took from this novel, I wrote my adaptation of The Green Bird and, though that project couldn’t be more different from this one, I think it taught me something incredibly important that will be a game changer going forward. For that project I wrote an outline for what my version of it was going to be like based off what I liked from the original play and then wrote the play itself. It was some of the easiest writing I’ve ever done. My first draft for that play, which I wrote very quickly, was better than every single second draft I have for this MG novel that I took my time and wrote nice and slow that it made me realize I need to start doing more outlining and research up front, no matter how much I dislike it, because it WORKS.

I’ve been beating myself up for ages because my non-fiction and even my plays take so much less time to write and revise than my novels and I only just finally realized that outlining was the missing link. I write up rough outlines of both non-fiction projects and my plays before I write them, something I’ve never done for more than the first few chapters of my novels for some reason, and that makes for better, closer-to-finished first drafts. THIS is why I’m consistently able to finish, polish and publish plays and NF books while its feels like beating my head against the wall with prose. The stupid thing is, I USED to be a meticulous plotter and extensively outlined both Wife and Mistress Novel before starting them and I’m genuinely not sure how I got so far off track from that practice. Whatever the reason, the process of writing Green Bird made it clear to me that an outline doesn’t hinder my creativity as I feared it would, it only helps it, and focuses my work so that I can make the most of every moment I have to write. That revelation was HUGE for me.

Does this mean that, going forward, I need to start outlining before I write my first draft (which, really, are more like zero drafts the way I write them)? I have no idea. That does seem to be part of my process. But it does mean that, no matter how many ideas I get, I’m not letting myself start a new draft of this MG novel until I have the basics of the plot nailed down. That means doing research, some free writing to talk out plot ideas in my head and spending a lot of time tinkering with my outline. While I fully expect to have to deviate from the plan once I start writing, something that always happens with plays and NF, I still need to have the basics figured out ahead of time to keep me from spinning my wheels and writing so many needless drafts while I figure stuff out.

The light bulb moment for me on this was reading interview after interview with writers who said they were pantsers who wrote without an outline and wondering what was wrong with me that I couldn’t do that same thing. Then a turn of phrase in one of those article lead to me finally realizing that they were almost all only talking about the first draft. That the whole plotter/pantser thing only applies to the first draft and, after that, you’ve got to have some crazy kind of computer brain to be able to construct a finished book without some kind of blueprint. I realized that some people outline before they write a word and others do it after they write their first draft but, in the end, like or it not, just about everyone does it. And once I realized that, it all came together.

When you think about it, I’m a planner by nature. I have a billion spreadsheets, to do lists, and crazy made up goals for myself. If that’s what works for my life, it was just plain silly I didn’t realize sooner that it could be what might work for my writing. And while it’s taking some getting used to this new way of approaching a project, it’s the first time I’ve started feeling like I understand what I’ve been doing wrong.

There’s a lot of work to do on this novel yet and probably many more revelations before the end. But I’m feeling good about my writing going forward and not just this project, because I finally have a plan.

Well, a plan… to make a plan.

But that’s still more than I had before.

Photo by Derek Keats