Pantsers - what do you actually know about your story when you start writing?

[stonedinstilletos]

So this kind of came up in my thread about serendipity which just got, if not necroed, than at least jolted back into life, but I think it's an interesting enough topic by itself to warent its own thread.

For those who don't know, 'planners vs pantsers' is a common phrase for distinguishing writers who make substantial plans for their work before starting to write against those who 'fly by the seat of their pants' and start to write with little idea of where the story is evenutally going to end up. From previous threads, I'm probably nearly as far along the planner end of the spectrum as it's possible to be and thus am frequently bewildered by writer who claim they know literally nothing about their stories before they start to write (and seemingly I bewilder them just as much).

So my question is thus very simple. As a pantser writer, you have a whole afternoon free to write, you've got nothing in progress (at least nothing you want to work on), and you open up a new document file (in the format of your choosing). As you strike the first key, what do you actually know (or suspect) about your story? Characters? Settings? Events? Length? Genre? Sexual activities?

For me, I like to know the beginning middle and end. Not in the sense that I have it outlined to death. I just need to know where my characters are starting from and where they are going. The mid point for me is not always the climax or turn of the story, but it can be.

It usually starts before I hit the place where I’m going to write, usually when I’m talking to myself in my car (yeah… I do that when I’m alone). I have a couple of these conversations that I remember and hope to use for later. Sometimes I forget them, but the ones I end up writing I remember. If I was better about writing things in a journal of ideas etc, it might be better, but I’m not that organized I guess.

Once I get to the writing, it will spin from that snippet that I’ve acted out in my head. I stopped thinking about length along time ago because I am congenitaly incapable of writing anything short. I can, usually, cut down an idea once its either done or I realize I’m on track to challenge War and Peace for page count. I will usually have a series of events I want to make sure get in there, sexual activities sometimes but not usually. Those acts usually depend on how the characters develop towards each other. I do try to pick a genre only because, from previous experience, it keeps me from flipping the tone of the piece randomly (at least I hope it does).

The thing I have the most trouble with when writing is the names of the characters. I‘m terrible at names to the point where sometimes I just use a random name generator.

My last story started with an image I saw online and then thought about it for a moment and then saw part of a movie that had the other character in it.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Most people want more interaction or feedback with readers, but this is difficult on the site. I average about 1 comment for every 1,700 views and many of them are not very detailed anyway. Still, a single nice comment out of thousands of views can put a smile on your face all day. If readers commented at ten-times the rate they currently do, I think a lot of us would be a lot less focused on scores - we're all aware that they are penicious and not really representative of the true quality of the work. Often, however, they're all we have to indicate if a work was well recieved or not and it's natural to wonder about this.

Agree this. My rule of thumb is one Vote per hundred Views, and one Comment per thousand - so when a story does far better than that, I know it's hit a chord. As you say, in the absence of comments, the scores are really all we've got, including the Votes/ View ratio.

It's also a buzz when older stories keep getting comments and faves, because that means you've got people reading your back catalogue, not just the latest offering.

My favourite comments are those that say, "nice work, not the typical thing you see around here" - which suits me just fine.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

Sometimes I plot a fair bit in my head, but more often I have a character or an image. How do I get that character to the point of being the image in my head, which generally means they have to get together with another character?

If I can't figure out their paths clearly then I just start writing them, and 5000 words later complaining they're still just being snarky and defensive at each other. Sometimes I edit down those sections to what turns out to be important, other times I decide it's all important for showing what the people are like. Sometimes I give up and put the characters away until they're willing to admit they want a quick fuck...

 

[EarlyMorningLight]

Been thinking about this a bit lately. I went through a few days of being down on myself snd my process. I don’t plot extensively but I’m not a complete pantser either. But when I start writing I’m very painstaking. I’ve never been much for drafting. Sometimes I think it’s a discipline I should’ve worked harder to cultivate, because it seems like it would be freeing to just blurt on a page then go back and fix it all later. But my brain makes me tinker and polish as I go.

Talking with another writer, I used sculpture as a metaphor for my process. I’ll generally start with a character or a scene in my head. That’s the raw material, looking at a big slab of stone and seeing the suggestions of a shape. Then I start chiseling. Even when the words are coming well, it always feels painstaking and precise. Deliberate. Of course, the stone itself ends up making some decisions for you and influencing the final shape, so the process is unpredictable, but it’s not as free and open ended as, say, sketching. I don’t know if that makes much sense but that’s how it feels for me.

 

[Thefireflies]

Maybe an hour or so ago I decided to attempt to start a story. I had a single scene in my mind, of someone floating on their back in the ocean under the sun at the beach, and I’ve also been thinking about maybe writing another Pink Orchid tale, so I’m trying to put the scene and theme together. Consequently I decided the someone is a woman, and her granddaughter came by, so she’s maybe in her late 50s or early 60s, and the granddaughter relayed a message from her grandfather, the woman's husband.

Not exactly riveting stuff, but I did write 500 words, and to be honest, it’s trash at the moment and going nowhere particularly fast. I may rewrite the opening or cull all of it, or change the characters completely. BUT the act of writing such a scene generates further ideas, which are already forming when I consider questions like: Why is she floating? Why is she at the beach? What is she thinking? Where is she going? And ultimately for Lit, how will this story grow into something with erotic and/or romantic themes?

Ideas will form but I don’t have much to go on with right now and I'm not yet invested in the story at all. Momentum is slow, but if ideas do come, and if those ideas pique my interest, momentum will follow, leading to many late nights of writing. This style of starting a story works for me as a hobby writer, but I have considered if I were to take writing beyond my hobby, something I don’t plan to do anytime soon, I would likely want to actually plan and plot at least an outline before putting finger to keyboard, to keep momentum going from the outset.

 

[HopelessDreams]

First of all, my ratio of planning vs. pantsing varies by story. The scenes in my older stories were more likely to have been well-established fantasies of mine before I ever started writing them out, whereas for my newer stories I've tended to make up more as I went along. I didn't want to repeat my previously-used fantasies too much, so I had fewer preconceived notions about what to include when I started writing those later stories. But even the ideas that I originated while writing those stories were still inspired by related ideas I'd previously thought of (even if I hadn't written those related ideas into stories before).

When writing Symbiosis: The Flower Bath, I started with the physical appearance I'd created of my protagonist Leilani. I was determined to feature her in a story, but I struggled for a good while regarding what type of story to write her into. I finally decided to rework my meditation fantasy that I’d formerly created to help put myself to sleep, but this time optimize it for masturbation. I kept the themes of the ear-licking ASMR and imagining oxytocin entering my body, because both fantasies can be either relaxing or erotic (or both simultaneously, as is often the case for me). But most of the adaptations that I made and the other elements of the story I decided on the fly during the actual writing process.

Generally though, I suspect that writing in a flow state wouldn’t tend to produce the most original results. Though I do find this type of writing to be the most enjoyable, it relies on subconscious associations, which tend to be based on clichés. To produce more creative output, I usually have to make a conscious effort to avoid writing about particular things that I don’t feel fully comfortable writing about (such as if they’re overused or I have a moral problem with them). And the first idea that occurs to me is too often a reflection of cultural norms rather than my intrinsic preference, or it’s just the most straightforward way of gratifying an erotic desire (whereas a more roundabout way can make the story a lot more interesting).

For all my stories (even the more recent ones), I don’t start writing until I already have an overarching story concept in mind (though it can be as basic as what can be conveyed by a Literotica tagline). Then I identify the ideas that I like a lot but haven’t already used in any of my previous stories, that would fit well into this new story. (I even have a list of these unused story ideas, ranked based on their importance to me.) Then I write the rest of the story around the concepts that I chose to feature.

 

[EarlyMorningLight]

Been thinking about this a bit lately. I went through a few days of being down on myself snd my process. I don’t plot extensively but I’m not a complete pantser either. But when I start writing I’m very painstaking. I’ve never been much for drafting. Sometimes I think it’s a discipline I should’ve worked harder to cultivate, because it seems like it would be freeing to just blurt on a page then go back and fix it all later. But my brain makes me tinker and polish as I go.

Talking with another writer, I used sculpture as a metaphor for my process. I’ll generally start with a character or a scene in my head. That’s the raw material, looking at a big slab of stone and seeing the suggestions of a shape. Then I start chiseling. Even when the words are coming well, it always feels painstaking and precise. Deliberate. Of course, the stone itself ends up making some decisions for you and influencing the final shape, so the process is unpredictable, but it’s not as free and open ended as, say, sketching. I don’t know if that makes much sense but that’s how it feels for me.

And after all that, I just furiously pantsed my way through a new 8.5k word story in three evenings. So maybe I don’t have a set process.

Of course, this one is about 80% autobiography at least, so does that really count as pantsing?

 

[ElectricBlue]

And after all that, I just furiously pantsed my way through a new 8.5k word story in three evenings. So maybe I don’t have a set process.

Of course, this one is about 80% autobiography at least, so does that really count as pantsing?

Of course it is. You didn't plot your life out, did you?

 

[KeithD]

Of course it is. You didn't plot your life out, did you?

I did. And I came closer to the plotline than I assumed I would.

 

[usermechanics]

when i "plot," i usually just plot a few things in my head which i feel are the most pivotal moments in the story, usually things that help set the scene and the transition period between the development and the smut itself. if i forget about them, then that just means they're not memorable enough to have written about in the first place.

 

[burgwad]

I'm demisexual. I need to know and love my characters before I can feel attracted to them.

But the thing is, once they exist, they call their own shots. As their author, I become something like a DM: I host the game, they play it. (I) If the characters are allowed to do what they want (rather than what I want [classic DM mistake]), then they will have the most possible fun; (II) and if the characters are having fun, then so is the reader.

I've tried planning. My brainstorming phase looks like planning. But I so often find that I can't read my character's minds or predict what they're going to do in the heat of the moment; and as soon as I try railroading/pigeon-holing them like that, they stop having fun, and usually the whole scene gets axed. That said, I avidly revise previous scenes as I write, too, so that the whole still feels at least a little considered and elegant in all the same kinds of skeletal, structural ways that pre-planned stories do.

 

[Imstillfun]

My stories always start out with a sex scene in my head, then I add characters, their relationship to each other, and a venue.

the whole story's goal is to get the characters to the sex scene.

 

[Emilymcplugger]

So this kind of came up in my thread about serendipity which just got, if not necroed, than at least jolted back into life, but I think it's an interesting enough topic by itself to warent its own thread.

For those who don't know, 'planners vs pantsers' is a common phrase for distinguishing writers who make substantial plans for their work before starting to write against those who 'fly by the seat of their pants' and start to write with little idea of where the story is evenutally going to end up. From previous threads, I'm probably nearly as far along the planner end of the spectrum as it's possible to be and thus am frequently bewildered by writer who claim they know literally nothing about their stories before they start to write (and seemingly I bewilder them just as much).

So my question is thus very simple. As a pantser writer, you have a whole afternoon free to write, you've got nothing in progress (at least nothing you want to work on), and you open up a new document file (in the format of your choosing). As you strike the first key, what do you actually know (or suspect) about your story? Characters? Settings? Events? Length? Genre? Sexual activities?

So I’m probably somewhere in the middle in that I plan the structure but the characters then impact on where the story goes.

In terms of the sex, that’s more ad-libby, it depends what I feel like and what fits the story. In “All the Devils are here” the first part ends with a dream orgy and so does part two, but in “Hot and Fuzzy” it takes awhile to get to a lengthy sex scene.

There’s no right or wrong, but you do know when it’s right and also when it’s wrong.

 

[burgwad]

Aaand I'm back, because I've begun a new short story. I've got two characters who I know well. I've got a couple of decent plot hooks. The rest is improv, baby. If you can improv, you can pants.

 

[Bubo_bubo]

Here's something neither planners nor pantsers might understand.
I'm at a point in the story where certain things need to get done to get to some milestone and I feel constrained and thus blocked in my writing. And I hate it.

 

[MillieDynamite]

Here's something neither planners nor pantsers might understand.
I'm at a point in the story where certain things need to get done to get to some milestone and I feel constrained and thus blocked in my writing. And I hate it.

I have those moments when you know where you need to get but can't settle the how of getting there. Or, worse, don't have thought in your head to put down next.

 

[TertiusHuman]

I love to write stories with a twist in them.

So when I sit down to start writing, I have the twist and the ending in mind, I have started various stories and had to delete them after the first paragraph because I realized things just weren't going the way they should get to that specific point that I want.

Other times I actually have a theme (when it's for a competition) or some inspiration (mostly music videos or an episode from a series), that makes me flesh out the story that I saw and want to tell from my viewpoint. Sometimes I actually take real-life events in my own life and turn them into a story.

So overall, I'd say that I have a faint outline of what I want and a faint idea of how to get there when I start writing. I once sat down and planned a story, that was ten years ago and that story is not even halfway planned. So yeah, planning doesn't always work for me.

What I do like to do is to finish writing my story and then give it to various people to read and let them tell me what they think I should fix or add

 

[Emilymcplugger]

Here's something neither planners nor pantsers might understand.
I'm at a point in the story where certain things need to get done to get to some milestone and I feel constrained and thus blocked in my writing. And I hate it.

This is gonna sound really weird, but here goes.

Start the bit after the bit that you’re stuck on.

I got really held up by part 2 of HOT AND FUZZY that I’m working on, but by launching into part 3 it made it easier to finish part 2.

I’m now finishing part 3 whilst also starting part 4 and it’s really freed me up (it’s only be doing this I remembered this is what I did with ALL THE DEVILS ARE HERE. Duh!)

 

[Bubo_bubo]

This is gonna sound really weird, but here goes.

Start the bit after the bit that you’re stuck on.

I got really held up by part 2 of HOT AND FUZZY that I’m working on, but by launching into part 3 it made it easier to finish part 2.

I’m now finishing part 3 whilst also starting part 4 and it’s really freed me up (it’s only be doing this I remembered this is what I did with ALL THE DEVILS ARE HERE. Duh!)

Not at all weird. It's what I've been trying to do, working from both sides to a middle.

 

[Voboy]

I had the same suggestion as @Emilymcplugger

I'm doing it right now, in fact. Not because I'm blocked, but just because I'm excited about the later bit. And I'm not always very patient.

 

[amandamagik]

I am a dedicated pantser...except when I'm not. This evening I "pantsed" my way to a Google Doc 3-page plot outline. Will I ever finish it? Or more importantly, will I be happy with the characters, plot, direction and action by the time I'm deeply into it? That's a good question...because the few other times that I worked from an outline of sorts...I came to dislike the story, my writing, the characters, their motivations and threw my hands up and put it into the long list of half-done, never-finished, "dear god did I really write that?" junk that litters my files (i have crap from 2013 if you believe it...Perhaps I fear the delete button).

But when I pants it...whatever little blossom of an idea formed in my head...the words flow. About...half the time probably I write myself into a corner. Without an escape, that ends the story. The other half of the time, things simply come together. I wish that I could give more context of how it happens, but it just does. When I have an idea I like, the words flow. When I sit and try to force myself to write, whether to pick up on a left-off tale, following the outline of whatever, or just "sit and write" it never works. Inspiration is a curious thing; so when it exists, I rip into it and let it flow. When it does not....it'll be months between publishing.

 

[Emilymcplugger]

I am a dedicated pantser...except when I'm not. This evening I "pantsed" my way to a Google Doc 3-page plot outline. Will I ever finish it? Or more importantly, will I be happy with the characters, plot, direction and action by the time I'm deeply into it? That's a good question...because the few other times that I worked from an outline of sorts...I came to dislike the story, my writing, the characters, their motivations and threw my hands up and put it into the long list of half-done, never-finished, "dear god did I really write that?" junk that litters my files (i have crap from 2013 if you believe it...Perhaps I fear the delete button).

But when I pants it...whatever little blossom of an idea formed in my head...the words flow. About...half the time probably I write myself into a corner. Without an escape, that ends the story. The other half of the time, things simply come together. I wish that I could give more context of how it happens, but it just does. When I have an idea I like, the words flow. When I sit and try to force myself to write, whether to pick up on a left-off tale, following the outline of whatever, or just "sit and write" it never works. Inspiration is a curious thing; so when it exists, I rip into it and let it flow. When it does not....it'll be months between publishing.

Personally I’ll always have the germ of an idea, a very (VERY) bare bones skeleton. We’re talking Mission Impossible style loose structure here, and then go from there, changing and adapting bits as I go.

What I notice with this is that the characters themselves speak to you. They move the story in their own way so that things you didn’t consider at first were possible, become possible as you move forward, I guess cause people are weird, they have their own motivations, desires and flaws and no-one can control this, not even the writer.

 

[onehitwanda]

What I notice with this is that the characters themselves speak to you.

This is one of my favourite parts of writing - discovering who the characters are.

 

[Duleigh]

This is one of my favourite parts of writing - discovering who the characters are.

I probably enjoy that most of all! When I chose to lock myself into a strict AR Plot I lose that freedom and don't enjoy writing. That's probably why I hated technical writing so much.

 

[Emilymcplugger]

I probably enjoy that most of all! When I chose to lock myself into a strict AR Plot I lose that freedom and don't enjoy writing. That's probably why I hated technical writing so much.

It depends on the story. On the big non-erotic thing I’m working on there are 10 chapters and each one covers a different story. I have an idea what the story is but it’s so loose I’ll still have that make it up as I go vibe.

For “Hot and Fuzzy”’an erotic version of “Hot Fuzz” I was stuck for ages but now that I’ve just started hitting keys I find I can’t stop and the characters are driving it all forward.

I now know I have a lot more sex, furious arguments, violent deaths and a mysterious organisation pulling the strings to look forward to.

I almost want to start every chapter but I will control myself and just stick to two at once.