How I Went from Pantsing to Plotting

If you’re a writer or hang around writer communities much, you may have heard a lot of different lingo. We’re working on our WIPs, we all have a copy of something called Save the Cat or Romancing the Beat, and so on and so forth.

Some of that terminology revolves around how writers go about writing their books. In general, there are assumed to be three different “types” of writers:

• Pantsers
• Plotters
• Plantsers

This refers, largely, to the amount of planning work we do before diving into a new story draft. I personally always approached writing by pantsing it. Yet, recently, I’ve been believing more and more in the power of the outline.

Here’s how I went from pantsing to a plotting.

What the Heck Is Pantsing?

Okay, before we dive into my journey, let’s do a quick recap of the terminology.

Being a plotter is pretty straightforward. This type of writer has an outline and maybe even character profiles and sketches, skeleton chapters, and so on. Plotters, in short, are very organized.

Pantsers, on the other hand, like to wing it. That’s where the term comes from: you’re going by the seat of your pants—hence you are “pantsing” it.

This type of writer does not like planning. Instead, this type of writer prefers to dive right into the story and let the story drive them. They often find outlines confining or constraining. They let their stories wander, so much so that the time and effort of creating a meticulous outline often seems like a waste. They’d rather get words down than waste time figuring out where the heck they’re going.

Plantsers are a sort of cross between plotters (or planners) and pantsers. They create outlines, much like their plan-forward plotter cousins, but those outlines are often vague. Plantsers have a rough idea of where they’re going, but there’s a lot of flexibility still—which allows them to let the story flow, much like their pantser cousins.

I Was a True Pantser

Previously, I was hardcore in the pantser camp. I viewed outlines as a waste of time and, worse, stifling my creativity. I much preferred to simply dive right into my manuscript, jotting down whatever happened to come to mind.

This, in my opinion, allowed the story to grow and evolve, versus trying to force it into some kind of preconceived notion of how it should go. I truly do love the moment when everything falls into place, when a plot problem seems intractable, only for your brain to stumble on the exact right solution. The lightbulb Eureka moment, if you will.

I also saw outlines as wasting my precious words and my precious time. I felt like the best way forward was simply to write as much as possible—never mind taking stock of where I was or where I was going. Just get those words down.

This approach can and does work. I’m proof of that: all of my novels until the latter half of 2024 were written with exactly zero planning.

Unfortunately, pantsing can lead to quite a few problems …

Pantsing Meant Scrapping Drafts Two or Three Times Over

The biggest issue with pantsing is that it is incredibly easy to write yourself into a corner. You just keep writing and writing. Then, boom, next thing you know, you hit a wall and you don’t know how to get out.

This happened to me a lot. I would get about partway through a draft and suddenly fizz out. I didn’t know where I was going. The tension in the book started to sag. It became boring. And, more often than not, I didn’t know how to save it.

The solution was usually to “reboot” the draft—which often meant starting over again. That sometimes meant I scrapped up to half a novel. Sometimes I did that two or three times over before I finally nailed the plot. Occasionally, there were bits and pieces I could salvage from an older draft. More often than not, I ran headfirst into a concrete barrier and had to completely overhaul what I was doing.

That is … not an ideal way of doing things, especially if you’re already feeling crunched for time. It inevitably led to delays. Take a look at the forthcoming Crabs in the Bucket, the seventh book in the Flirting with the Zodiac series. I struggled with that book; I rebooted the draft at least three times over before I nailed it, and even then I wasn’t sure I had it.

That, in turn, meant the book was delayed from 2024 to 2025. And it is certainly not the only book where that exact scenario has happened. I’ve had to redraft the book several times over, leading to a delay. (The worst ones, at this point, is probably Books 8 and 9 in the Zodiac series. Both have been delayed about four or five years now. Oops.)

So, Why Doesn’t Pantsing Work Anymore?

Quite simply, I have a kid now. If I ever want to get another book into print, I need to work in a more efficient manner.

I thought I was time-crunched before, which was my excuse for just jumping in and writing all the words. Now, however, I can see that is an inefficient way of working.

It’s kind of funny that I approached my art that way before, because I am always a big advocate of planning in other arenas. One of my biggest household innovations has been the implementation of a weekly dinner menu.

Creating a weekly plan takes about five to ten minutes, streamlines all the tasks that need to be completed around cooking dinners, and saves time by allowing us to prep ahead, shift responsibility to whoever has the most time. And it means we don’t waste time and effort arguing about what’s for dinner.

An outline is exactly the same as the menu when it comes to drafting. An outline allows you to plan ahead and streamline the tasks around drafting. It means no more writing yourself into a wall, no more needing to reboot the draft five times over. It means no more stopping to go back and re-read the entire manuscript because you had to leave it alone for a few weeks. You can just check the outline and jump back in.

And, like the menu, it only takes a short time to prepare it.

That is crucial when you have a child. Children are chaos, so even the best-laid plans go by the wayside more often than not. Arming yourself with organizational tools to better use your time and give yourself more flexibility are the only smart way to work.

Remembering What the Heck I Wanted to Do

The other reason I’m big into outlines these days is so I can remember the plot points I want. I have too many ideas and not enough time to write them. That’s always been true, but with the baby on deck now, I can see it might be a very long time before I get to some of the ideas I’ve had. I really want to write these ideas down. Maybe I’ll get to them sooner than I think, or maybe I’ll circle back around to them and discard them as being less great than I thought.

Before, I’d simply give the WIP doc a title, maybe jot a couple of notes, and then leave it. For ages. Often, when I returned, I had no recollection of what I’d wanted to do with the WIP, even if I’d had it all plotted out in my head before.

The old gray mare’s memory ain’t what it used to be, it seems. So, if I actually want to preserve these ideas and have them available for me when I do finally get around to writing some of these stories, then I need to have a fairly robust outline.

So far, it’s worked well for a couple of novellas and at least one novel. We’ll see if it keeps working. I suspect that if I keep outlining, it will keep working its magic.

Have I Really Stopped Pantsing?

I still believe in the power of letting the story tell itself. That is, you can try to plan out every last detail of a book, but as you’re writing it, it’s likely going to get away on you.

What I mean by that is stories often seem to take on a life of their own. In turn, you might be writing to your outline when sudden inspiration strikes. What if the scenario went like this? What if this was happening in the background? Or what if this character did this, and oh, look at how that connects all the dots.

Outlines do not really help with this scenario, and they cannot account for those random flashes of insight and inspiration. That’s one reason I resisted outlining for so long. I’m prone to those random flashes of insight and inspiration, which means, more often than not, my stories veer off in an unexpected direction. That, in turn, makes the rest of my outline somewhat useless. And that was why I largely viewed outlining as a waste of time. I’d spend time and effort and energy and words outlining the book, only to get to writing it and boom! There’s that flash of insight, and wouldn’t it be amazing if X happened? And then I’d scribble that, go back and look at my notes, and discover I was now off-roading, and there was seemingly no way back to the path I was on. Chuck the entire outline, keep writing off vibes.

Okay, Maybe I’m More of a Planster

That’s a viable option too, though—it’s plantsing. And maybe that is the happy medium for me. I don’t want to be a bona fide pantser any more, because I don’t have time or energy to reboot drafts three or four times over from a near-complete state. Yet I also hesitate to box myself in, to adhere to the outline and disallow random flashes of insight. I trust my intuition—those random flashes usually make my story that much stronger, so I’m hesitant to abandon them.

Plantsers tend to use vague outlines, and they don’t mind if the story veers “off course.” They still take the time to make the outline, though, which gives them their initial direction. It’s also something they can return to if that random flash of insight happens to lead them astray or into a corner.

The long and short of all of this is that I have realized the power of the outline, which has radically changed how I write. In turn, I hope to be more productive—or at least as productive as I can be while raising a tiny human and working full-time.