I’m a “pantser,” though I don’t like that term. But what does it even mean?
That I wear pants? That I favor pants? Champion the wearing of pants?
Well, yes to all of those, but in the world of writing, that’s not what it means. Unless we are talking about Victor Hugo (Les Miserable), who, in order to make himself stay home and write, would lock away all of his clothes in the closet and then hide the key from himself, so that he could not go out in public and was forced to write naked or partially clothed (true story).
But for writers, pantsing means, basically, writers who are “flying by the seat of their pants,” when writing a novel or story, and is held up in opposition to “planners" (or "plotters"), who plan/outline their books before they write. Perhaps the most famous (extreme) planner is J.K. Rowling, who spent FIVE YEARS creating a very detailed outline of all seven books before she wrote one word of the Harry Potter series. The most famous “pantser” might be Stephen King, who has said that he starts a novel with just a basic idea and no real details.
“Pantser/Plotter” is something you hear quite a bit about on Twitter/X, and people like to talk about the various merits of each. When I was in graduate school, those terms didn’t exist, and no one really even talked about the concepts. Sometimes writers would ask each other “Do you ever outline a story?” and most of the time the answer was something like “Not really.”
So, that grad school memory starts to get at why I don’t really like these terms….but honestly, the real truth is that I don’t think they are useful for any conversation about writing. Here are a couple of problems with talking about writing this way.
1. Almost every writer is, to some degree, both. Arguably, I’m a staunch “pantser,” in that, for example, with the novel I’m writing right now, I have no idea what’s going to happen in the next chapter, but I trust that I will figure it out when I get there. That’s “pantser” by definition. BUT…I also have a bunch of notes (an entire stack of them), for what’s going to happen further along—notes I may or may not use. Also, I know what the very last scene of the book is, have some notes on the wording of it. But I don’t know how I’m going to get there just yet. So is that plotting? Well…yeah, partly. Am I a pantser or a plotter? To that I would say yes, in a ratio of about 70/30.
2. This is my biggest problem—the actual word “pantser.” Remember where it came from? Flying by the seat of your pants, which implies what? It implies that you are winging it, that you are playing it by ear, going off the cuff, maybe faking it till you make it. A wing and a prayer. Throwing it against the wall to see what sticks. Lots of these clichés mean the same thing as “pantsing,” and none of them are accurate.
So, let’s talk about that second one a bit, by asking this question: what are we mostly trying to do when we write? There are lots of answers to that on the “technical side” (e.g., create memorable characters, maintain conflict, etc.), but what about the more esoteric?
There is a certain magic in writing, a certain amount of X factor that none of us can really explain. Maybe call it “flow state,” but it’s more than that. Ask any writer—if you are deep into writing your novel, and you go out into the world, somehow almost everything you encounter “fits.” I overhear a conversation at a coffee shop, and it’s perfect for my next scene. I pass by an unusual house and know immediately that it’s the house my character lives in. You observe something odd (like the time I saw a woman in the rain raking leaves in a teal housecoat), and boom, you know immediately that it belongs in your book. In these times, it feels as though the whole world exists to help you get your novel finished.
Also, if you get stuck in your pantsing, often you can literally “sleep on it,” and the answer is crystal clear in the morning. How do I know when I have had a REALLY successful day of writing? When I think back later that evening, I can’t remember one word, one scene, that I wrote. It’s vague, like trying to recall a really interesting dream you had last night, but you can’t quite grasp it.
And this gets at the core of my problem with that word. We pantsers are not flying by the seats of our pants, but instead are trying to write from within our subconscious minds. We are trying to write using exclusively the part of the brain where nighttime dreams are created. How many people sit down at night and plan/plot their dreams before bedtime? Maybe “lucid dreamers” do that, but most people don’t. Why? Because there is no need, and because if you did, your dreams would be far less strange and interesting. Think of the crazy heights of imagination your dreams hand to you on a nightly basis—stuff that is so weird and full of compelling details that often you can’t even describe it, though you can still see it. By training myself over time to enter that subconscious/flow state when I write, I am simply turning over my work to the part of my brain that’s better at it—the nuclear core of my imagination invents things that are far better and more interesting than I could come up with by just staring at the ceiling and thinking “Hmmm…I wonder what should happen next?” I don’t know what happens next, but somehow my dream-brain does, and reveals it to me when I get there.
In Pixar’s movie, Onward, there is a scene where the hero must cross an invisible bridge—the bridge is there, but each step of the bridge appears only if one is willing to put a foot forward and step, in faith and trust. That’s pantsing, and in writing a novel—I know the bridge is there, but I can’t see it until I take the next step. But what I’m not doing it “flying by the seat of my pants” hoping I can somehow find scraps of wood and a few bent nails and somehow cobble together some rickety thing that will get me across. No, it’s more simply trust and faith, in the deepest and richest part of one’s imagination.
Are you a pantser, a plotter, both? Comment below and tell me about it.
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