In this episode of The Writing Coach podcast, writing coach Kevin T. Johns examines the benefits of both discovery writing and story planning and then suggests they are both part of the same creative cycle.
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The Writing Coach Episode #170 Show Notes
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The Writing Coach Episode #170 Transcript
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Hello, beloved listeners, and welcome back to The Writing Coach podcast. It is your host, as always, writing coach Kevin T. Johns here.
We are nearing the end of August. We are nearing the end of the summer, which is an exciting time for everyone. The kids are going back to school, and people are getting geared up to make that final rush towards the end of the year to get all the things accomplished that they wanted to get accomplished. And, on September 4, the first Monday of September, we are starting the latest round of STORY PLAN INTENSIVE.
STORY PLAN is my four-week program. It’s an email program, you sign up, and I send you emails every day, Monday to Friday, with links to training videos to help you develop your writer’s craft knowledge. Then on Fridays, you get a homework assignment designed to stimulate creativity and help you plan and plot your book. By the end of the program, in less than one month’s time, you’re going to have an incredible outline for your book If you want to participate, and I hope that you do, register now.
Oh, did I mention it’s free?
Yep, just sign up with your email address, and you’ll get four weeks of training videos on me.
In today’s episode of the podcast, I want to talk about pantsers and planners.
If you’ve spent any time in the writing world, you’ve probably seen arguments, or you’ve seen it established as a dichotomy that you have these pantsers and you have these planners and never the two should mix.
Well, on this episode, I’m going to talk a little bit about my thinking on pantsers and planners and hopefully give you a new perspective on this entire concept. Is it really a dichotomy? Or is it actually something much more similar to an ouroboros, to a snake eating its own tail, that circular, cyclical symbol that you might be familiar with.
What is a Pantser?
Now, if all of this is new to you and this has sounded crazy, let’s establish some definitions upfront. So what is a pantser? Well, pantsers are also called organic writers, or they’re called discovery writers, and what this style of writer does is they sit down, and they write, and they make the story up as they go along. They don’t know where it’s going, they don’t know what’s going happen. They’re just putting fingers to the keyboard and seeing what sort of magic happens.
Probably the most famous example of this, or the most outspoken, perhaps, of this style, is Stephen King. In his book On Writing he talks about how he is a discovery writer. That’s a hugely popular book. He’s a hugely popular writer. So I think a lot of people who pants feel like Stephen King saying that that’s how he writes really justifies that approach as valid, which it absolutely is.
That said, what did we open this podcast with? We opened it with me promoting a course on planning, so you could probably guess where my biases lay. I certainly think planning is effective.
What is a Planner?
The planner thinks about their story and plots it and plans it (at least to some extent) ahead of time before they actually start writing or drafting the book. They have a plan. They have a general sense of what is going to happen in the story and where it’s going to go. When it comes time to write, they sit down, and they execute on the pre-planned story.
I really want to focus on the benefits right now and demonstrate how both of these approaches can have really creative and beneficial aspects to them.
Benefits of Pantsing
On the pantser side of things, there’s something creatively freeing about just sitting down and writing and doing whatever the heck you want, free from structure and free from rules. So many people become artists or use art as their creative expression, and as their rejection of the mainstream. Many writers are rebels and many artists want to smash the rules or think of a new way of coming at life or coming at story. Making it up as they go along seems very conducive to that sort of approach to freedom and creativity and art.
Pantsers often also enjoy the surprises that come along from discovery writing In the same way that a reader doesn’t know where the story is going, the discovery writer doesn’t know either. It makes the drafting process perhaps more pleasurable because you get these fun little surprises the same way that a reader does.
Pantsers also feel like there’s probably a more direct channel for them between wherever creativity comes from and the page. There’s a sort of unfiltered nature to it. Whether you believe imagination and creativity come from your brain, or whether you believe it comes from the muse, or whether you believe in the collective unconscious, or whatever metaphysical belief or physical belief you have about creativity, sitting down and just letting words flow really does feel like an unfiltered pathway from that magical source of arts and creativity and getting those words onto the page.
Pantsing also provides a lot of flexibility for the writer. You can take the story, wherever you want to take it. If you’re writing a romantic comedy and halfway through it you decide the characters are goning get on the spaceship and go to the moon, you can do that. You can do whatever you want. You’re not bound by any structure and you’re not bound by any conventions. If you’re getting bored with the story going in one direction, you can really easily just take it in another because you have that flexibility.
Discovery writing is also perhaps quicker in terms of you just sit down and start doing it. There’s no education process involved. There’s no planning process involved. You’re not organizing scenes so that they fit a certain structure. If you’re someone who just wants to create, who just wants to sit down and get to it and write, then certainly pantsing is the way to get there.
Another thing that planning requires that pantsing doesn’t is really a sense of what it is you want to say? What is the theme of your book? What is the controlling idea? What message are you sharing with the reader about the world, or about life, or about humanity? The reality is we don’t always know what it is we want to say. We have a story that we want to tell, and in the discovery writing it, in the finding of the story, we can also find that theme. So while a planner who can perhaps feel locked up and not ready to start because they haven’t figured out what the story really has to say, the discovery writer says, “Hey, I don’t care that I don’t know what I have to say. I’m going to find it along the way.”
All of these elements are reasons why someone might want to discovery write, or why people who have experimented with pantsing or experimented with discovery writing have really enjoyed the process.
I understand all of that, and I get it. That said, what I have found is the most effective way of writing is to plan ahead.
Benefits of Planning
One of the benefits of planning ahead is that it really ensures that you’re starting from a solid foundation. Unlike the mystery and perhaps the insecurity that comes from discovery writing, if you plan ahead, you know that the story is going to be good at a basic level before it even begins. You’re able to write with that confidence that this story does have character arcs, that this story is adhering to genre conventions, that the story is paced properly because you’re writing it within the context of an established popular macro-level story structure. We can base things on the thematic elements because we know what it is we want to say.
We also understand the world that the story is taking place in because the world-building has been established ahead of time. We know how magic works in this world, or we know what 1890s England was like or what it’s like to be hunting a buffalo on the plains of America. We’ve done perhaps the research, we’ve done the thinking, the planning on the world building ahead of time and so all of that is going to be coherent when we sit down and actually start writing.
I mentioned that what discovery writers often find efficient about discovery writing is you can just sit down and write. I don’t know if that’s actually the case. I mean, it’s certainly the case you can do it, but if it’s efficient, I’m not convinced. Because if you’re discovery writing, what’s happening is you are planning the story, figuring out the story, you’re figuring out all those things we just talked about (the world building, the genre, the character arcs) as you go, as well as writing. You’re doing two things at once. You’re creating and you’re writing at the same time.
Whereas I find it much more efficient to do that thinking ahead of time, to have the world built to understand what the character arc is going to be, so that when I sit down to write, or you sit down to write, you’re just executing on the scene. You already know what the scene needs to be, and you know where it exists within the larger context of the story. To me, that way is more efficient because I’m sitting down and I’m writing, I’m not trying to do the creative brainstorming, research, thinking work, AND writing at the same time.
You are also able to do things like establish setups and pay offs. Much of storytelling is putting something in the story and then ensuring it pays off later on down the road. The most obvious example of this is foreshadowing. If we are going to have twists and turns and surprises in our story (which we hopefully will), the reader needs to feel like those twists and turns and surprises didn’t come out of nowhere; we need to foreshadow them. Of course, this is a difficult challenge because if we foreshadow too obviously, it’s not going to be a surprise because the reader will have seen it coming. But we, for the most part, need to get something in there so that they feel like they should have seen the twist coming.
All of this can happen in the first draft if we’ve planned ahead and know where things are going. If we are being surprised ourselves by the twists and turns of the story, we’ve then created an extra level of work for ourselves where, in revisions, we will need to go back and foreshadow and set up those twists and turns.
I think that’s an example of something that’s consistent across the board in that planning ahead makes the revisions process was easier.
What I sometimes say in my marketing for STORY PLAN INTENSIVE is that you’ll be able to write a first draft that reads like a third draft of a discovery-written book. It’s because all of these things, the pacing, the coherent world-building, the foreshadowing, the setups and the payoffs, the character arcs, the structure, all of these things have been determined ahead of time, so when you get to the end of that first draft, you’re way ahead of where the discovery writers are because they now need to go back and reverse engineer all of those things via a second or a third draft.
The Creative Ouroboros
I think what that demonstrates is this ouroboros idea that I’m talking about. In that both discovery writers and planners ultimately end up in the exact same spot.
In order to have a coherent, popular story that people like, there needs to be change. There needs to be character arcs. You need to adhere to the conventions of the genre in a way that’s pleasing to the reader. The story needs to have story structure.
At the very least, the discovery writer still needs to go back and ask, “What’s the beginning of the story? What’s the middle and what’s the end?” Stories need structure. Stories need theme. They need thematic patterning and symbols and thematic elements that hold the story together and give it a sense of unity.
And, of course, the world-building needs to be coherent. There needs to be a realism to settings and there needs to be a realism to the physics of the world that we’re writing the story in.
So ultimately, whether it’s first draft, second draft, third draft, planners and pantsers end up in the same spot, which is a story that ideally executes on all of those story craft fundamentals.
Planners start with the fundamentals, and then draft a super, super solid, first draft.
Pantsers sit down and write a fairly messy first draft, but then reverse engineer through the second and third draft to ensure they have all of those fundamentals that need to be there in the story. And ultimately, perhaps in the third draft, get to where the planners were in the first draft.
We all get to the same place eventually.
STORY PLAN INTENSIVE for pantsers?
One of the reasons I wanted to talk about this is because you’ve heard me talk about STORY PLAN INTENSIVE. This is my program for planning your next book. These are all the things you can do to set yourself up for success in drafting a first draft and that ideally is going to get to a third draft so much quicker than if you discovery wrote the piece.
But I think because I often present the program in that way, the only people who sign up are people who are at that exact stage of their writing. They say, “Hey, I want to plan a book and so I’m going to sign up for this program that helps me do it in less than a month’s time.” What I want to emphasize is, however, that for all you discovery writers out there, if you are midway through a first draft and you’re struggling, and you’re feeling lost, and you’re not moving forward as effectively as you think you can, or you’re worried that the story is just not holding together, then now is a perfect time to join STORY PLAN.
What you’re going to be able to do is learn a bunch of craft fundamentals, and then apply them to what you’ve already written so that you can figure out where you need to go next, figure out the rest of the story based on what you’ve discovered and written so far.
If you’ve discovery written or pantsed a first draft, and now you’re at the revision stage, and you’re thinking, “I don’t even know where to start. I don’t know what to do. I just sat down and wrote 100,000 words, and now I’m supposed to just sit down and make it better. How do I make it better?” Well, join STORY PLAN! This is the perfect opportunity for you to either learn writer’s craft fundamentals, or refresh yourself on all of them, and then apply them as an analytical tool to your existing manuscript.
I like to talk about the “homework assignments” in STORY PLAN. And it perhaps makes it makes it sound like I’m testing you, like “Did you pay attention in class this week about what I taught?” But that’s not really what these homework assignments are about. What they are is exercises meant to stimulate creativity based on the craft lessons that we discussed that week. They’re really exercises to help you determine where your story needs to go.
If you’ve already completed a draft, the exercises can be used to reverse-engineer your story to get it where it needs to go and where it needs to be. STORY PLAN is not just a creativity-stimulating and planning tool. It’s also an analytical tool that you can use to guide your revisions on a manuscript that was discovery written.
All right? If you are a pantser if you’re out there and you’ve been making up your story as it went along, or if you wrote an entire first draft and you know it needs to improve, you know it can get better, but you’re not sure where to start, tou’re not sure what questions you should be asking of the manuscript, join STORY PLAN now.
It is not just for planners ready to plan their next book. It’s for any creative writer, looking to refresh and polish up on the fundamentals of Writer’s Craft and ensure that the elements that need to be in there in order for your book to be popular with the mass audience have been inserted where they need to go.
We start off in just a week’s time. The first week of September is when the emails start going out, so don’t waste any more time. Get signed up for the September round, and I will help you either plan your next book in 30 days or less, or produce an incredible analysis of your existing manuscript by the end of September.
Pantsers are welcome. Planners are welcome. Creating art is an organic process, regardless of what you call yourselves. We’re all in this creative ouroboros, this circle of creativity and drafting and revisions, and regardless of where you are in that cycle, I’d love to have you as part of the September round of STORY PLAN INTENSIVE.
All right, thank you my friends. As always, thank you for subscribing and listening to the podcast. I look forward to working with you in September on your story.
I will also see you on the next episode of The Writing Coach.
