FROM PANTSTER TO PLOTTER: MY WRITING PROCESS EVOLUTION

There are writers who are pantsters – writing without a plan, by the seat of their pants. On the other the other end of the spectrum, there are the plotters. These are the writers who plot out their story in advance, by chapter and sometimes even by scene. I believe most writers fall somewhere in between.

For me, I started pretty far on to the pantster end. For my debut novel, Their Last Chance, all I started with was an idea for a reality television show featuring divorcing couples that would take place on an island. That’s it. And I started writing with four point-of-view (POV) characters (the husband, wife, and each of their attorneys) and no plan. At the start of each chapter, I wrote a vignette about something that happened in the character’s past that would inform the upcoming chapter. These were cool and taught me a lot about my characters. But none of them made it into the book. When I finished my seat-of-my-pants draft, the vignettes made it almost twice as long as a commercially viable novel.  Amazingly, once I took the past glimpses out, the story was the right length and pretty good, especially considering I had four POV characters. So, I figured this was my writing style. I was a pantster. And I could write four POV characters with no plan.

Enter Mother of the Accused. Like Their Last Chance, I started with just an idea: two friends with teen children go on a multi-family vacation and a son in one family is accused of sexually assaulting the daughter in the other family. If you’ve read the book, you’ll know this is not the exact storyline (it was a rough enough subject without the familiarity of the families), but it was my initial idea. I planned to write the story from the viewpoint of each mother and each of their lawyers. I had no real plan other than this, but as I’d written a book that way before, I figured it would work. It didn’t. None of it came together in the way Their Last Chance had, and I flailed around until I finally scrapped two of the viewpoints and made it just about the mother of the accused and her lawyer, also a love interest. This made writing and characterization more manageable, but it was still hard. I ended up changing the entire book from third person to first person, which allowed for deeper character exploration. This changed my preference in writing - all my books are in first person - but I still didn’t have a great strategy for pre-writing.  

Since Mother of the Accused was a heavy book, I decided to work on an idea I’d had for a while for a lighter story involving a holiday-themed amusement park. I thought my issue with Mother of the Accused was having four POV characters, so I decided The Santa Games would have just two. But I still had no real plan other than that I wanted there to be a scene where dozens of Santas help with the park. When the book was done, I loved pieces of the story and the two main characters, but something wasn’t right. A developmental editor looked at it and told me I had a “sagging middle.” She turned me on to a template used by many writers called “Save the Cat” which helps stories maintain interest throughout. I rewrote major portions of the book to loosely fit the “Save the Cat” model, and the story was saved.

I used the Save the Cat model to outline Fun Lessons (a romantic comedy), Home (an upmarket fiction book), and Why Not?, my yet-to-be released senior rom-com. I don’t follow the Save the Cat model to a tee but use it as a template to make sure my story will move toward a climax and conclusion.  Save the Cat helps, but it’s a plotting tool. It makes sure the plot is moving along, but it doesn’t necessarily give the why. Why are the characters doing what they are doing? Why does what is happening matter to them? So, while I’d scoped out the plot of these three novels in advance, I hadn’t started thinking about character whys until I started writing. This required some rewriting and rethinking about the characters as I went which required extensive revisions.

So now, as I start to outline my seventh novel (?!?), I am using Lisa Cron’s character plotting advice in her book Story Genius AND the Save the Cat plot points to outline characters and plot before I start writing. I’ll see how it goes but I think I may have found my process. Phew!