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!
Haha! I totally thought you had a typo there at first. 😉 But now I think you’ve coined a new term!