Plotters vs Pantsers

It’s the age-old question… are you a Plotter or a Pantser?  Well, you may say, that’s quite a personal question.  It really goes to the heart of how we think, how we work, and what makes us click.

Everything about me screams Pantser.  Once, for work, I had to take the Myer’s Briggs personality traits test.  I scored right down the middle for each of the attributes:  Extravert/Intravert, Sensing/Intuition, Thinking/Feeling… I could have gone either way for each of these.  But for the Judgment/Perceiving trait (you know, the one that tells you whether or not you like to plan), I scored off the charts as a Perceiver. In Myers Briggs terminology, this means that I am least comfortable in a world that is planned (plotted) or orderly.  It made total sense.

I recalled every single trip I had ever taken with my spouse (a confirmed card-carrying member of the Judgment/Plotter camp) where he insisted we book a hotel or define a travel route in advance.  Annoys the hell out of me.  The best vacation I ever took was when I booked two airline tickets:  one into Athens, Greece and one out of Milan, Italy 11 days later.  What happened during those 11 days… travel, hotels, food…and how I got from one place to the other, were spontaneous, unplotted and entirely awesome.  Oh, and I only had a couple hundred Euro on me, and no ATM or credit card (holy shit I miss college).  This is the stuff of nightmares for my husband, and yet I live to tell of my adventures.  I could not be more of a natural-born Pantser.

I have been able to survive as a serial Pantser for a very long time.  I managed to graduate college, grad school, and have a successful career in a fast-paced, high-stakes job throwing all notions of planning to the wind.  I have noticed, however, that the larger a project gets, the less successful Pantsing is (for me).  I learned this the very hard way with my first novel.  I had lots of ideas.  I drank lots of coffee.  Words rolled off my fat fingers.  Scrivener smoked.  And then I hit the editing process and as I read what I had written, I felt like I was reading the aftermath of a binge weekend.  Wait, she did what? Good Lord.

The good news is, I survived.  The project survived.  The novel lives!  But, I learned a lot about some of the virtues of (some) planning.  I guess we’ll say that I’m a partial convert.  For any short projects– I Pants away.  Sometimes with no plan whatsoever.  It is liberating, but  I will confess, I start many more projects than I finish.  For anything novel-length or longer, I have cried uncle and I now engage in some form of outlining.

I’ll never be a full-fledged Plotter, because the spark in my scribble is all spontaneous.  The ideas come to me while I am hard at work–while I am engrossed in writing, while I am growing my characters, while I am typing out the intricate details of each of my scenes.  During a good writing session, I have several Frank the Tank/Will Ferrell Old School moments… What happened? I blacked out.  I surprise–nay, amaze myself.  When I try to map out my story in detail ahead of time, it is dull, it is boring, it lacks life.  It is all scribble and no spark.

The compromise comes in the form of a written outline.  I contributed to a Kickstarter earlier this year called the “Pano Notebook”.  It’s a notebook that is about the length of a small laptop, and is long and thin.  The pages are graph-paper like and it serves perfectly as my outlining companion.  I can lay it out directly in front of my laptop or iPad, and reference it as I type.

My outlining goes something like this:

(1) Storyboard the entire story in three boxes (fits on one page):  Beginning, Middle, End.  I write the basic themes and events in each box, including major developments for major characters.  I write and underline what I imagine will be the end state of each of the three sections.

(2) I write out a chapter outline for each chapter in each section, again using boxes sketched onto the graph paper.  I list what each character will do, what events will take place, and an interesting tidbit or two about the chapter in each block.  I draw arrows, reference other chapters with little symbols, and list research that must be completed to finish each chapter. I write all in pencil.  In the first pass, I leave at least half of the box empty to allow me to add the spark that inevitably comes as I type and consume way too much coffee. I can outline two chapters per page (and the pages are small– 5″x11″).

(3) I get a little better each time I do it.  It comes a little easier.  But I will never, ever be a Plotter.  Hats off to those of you who are, because I imagine your editing process is so much cooler than mine.

Myers Briggs will say that we each have one “ideal world” where we reside, and while we can adapt and learn to live in a different world, we will always be most comfortable in our natural world.  For me, that will always be Panster.  It is who I am, it is how I live and breathe.  But, I have adapted quite well to the concept of Plotting, via my rudimentary outlining.  It saves me time, it keeps me on track, and it has resulted in shorter, more succinct texts.  I can get more detail into my storyline because my story is streamlined and the detours are limited.  These days, I am happy to write this way and I write better when I write this way.  However, don’t expect me to adapt my vacationing to this model…when left to my own devices I’ll always choose the journey over the destination.