PANTSING VS. PLOTTING: THE RESULTS ARE IN

I wrote a guest blog a few years back about the benefits of using a system I call Road Mapping to write a novel. Road Mapping is creating a detailed outline of a novel prior to writing it. This is how I've always written my books. I am a  planner. I love to make lists. I love to know exactly where I'm going before I begin my journey.

Some people did not agree with my point of view on this. Writers tend to fall into one of two categories: Planners and Pantsers. Pantsers are writers who just start writing and see where the story leads them. Of course, they may have some good ideas to get them started, but they don't follow an outline. They follow their hearts. Feelings run strong in both camps, sometimes too strong.

After reading a couple of comments about my post defending the Pantser way of doing things, I decided that to be fair, I really needed to try writing a novel without a safety net -- just once. So I did. That summer I set a goal. I would write every day for 90 days. All I knew ahead of time was the book's basic premise (I had no idea what the plot would be) and that the finished product would be a 50,000 word young adult paranormal novel.

So I set off without a map, without an outline, without any idea where this would end up. I wrote every day for about an hour, and by September I had a finished manuscript. That manuscript was CONTACT, which was published in 2014 with Hallowed Ink Press.

So, I can honestly say that I've written novels using both the Pantsing and the Planning methods. Here were my thoughts on them both.

TIME

Pantsing gave me results faster than Planning has. My other novels all took around a year to write, including the planning stages. My pantsed novel took three months.  The amount of time I'm spending in revision is about the same.  This is not what I expected, because I thought my pantsed novel would be full of holes and need to have significant patch ups. It hasn't needed any more repair work than my planned novels.

PLOT DEVELOPMENT

I found that while my planned novels were easier to actually sit down an write because I knew exactly what I wanted to write by the time I turned on my computer, the actual process of figuring out the plot was the same. I still mulled it over in my brain, still dreamed about it, still got excited when I figured things out. The only difference was that in one case I jotted down my thoughts first, and in the other I went straight to writing the text.

QUALITY

Well, of my plotted novels, one is being published in May. Another won 1st place in a contest and has garnered some great attention in another. My pantsed novel has already drawn attention from both a publisher and an agent. So, I have to say pantsing did not diminish the quality of the finished product.

IN CONCLUSION

I am left on the fence on this one. I can no longer say one method is better than the other. I've done them both and had success with both. I think in the future I may not rely so heavily on outlining as I once did. But I do like to know where I'm going in a story, even it's just in my head. But I may very well try my hand at winging it again one of these days, just for the fun of it.