Writing Up Wednesday #2

Writing Up Wednesday is a brand new meme created by Lizzy of The Bent Bookworm, this one for authors!

Writing Up Wednesday #2: Plotter or Pantser?

If you’re not familiar with the terms, check out this article from the folks at NaNoWriMo. Basically, most authors fall into one of these two categories – do you plot and plan everything out, or do you fly by the seat of your pants? As a note of interest, GoodReads put together this little list of famous authors with notes of which camp they claim. Surprised by any of them?

This is a hard one.  I tend to refer to myself as a Plantster, which in no way suggests anything weird about me and plants.  Nope.  It just means that it changes from project to project.  Sometimes my writing starts with an idea that I just have to get out.  So I go with it.  I write and write and write until I’ve come to a natural stopping point.  I’ve just pants’d.  Other times I get an idea, but it’s own that needs some research.  Then I research and plan and plot my way through it and then I write.  But most of the time, it’s a combination of the two.  I write what hits me in short form.  Then I go back, read it, think about it, play with it.  And then I plot.

There was a lot of plantsing with Kissing Frogs, my current WIP.  It started out as a rom-com short story for a college writing class a couple of years ago.  A 15-page story.  My teacher, also a published author, liked it and convinced me to use it for my final.  For the final, we had to take a project and expand it.  It went from 15 pages to 50.  I aced the final and she encouraged me to turn it into a novel and publish it.  So here I am.  It is so very different from what it once was.  It is the result of a pants’d short story, pants’d into something bigger.  Then it was plotted and a full-length first draft was written.  And then the plantsing began as the characters began to think for themselves.  Then more plotting for the second draft, and then plantsing as I went through it.  It’s what works for me!