Improving the process

[onehitwanda]

Save the Cat is probably the most detailed.

What sort of interest rate can I expect if I Save the Cat?

 

[onehitwanda]

I feel so called out and/or seen. I'm not even a plotter, I just pants an ungodly amount of lore for no reason but my own amusement.

better lore than vore.

 

[StillStunned]

What sort of interest rate can I expect if I Save the Cat?

Total lack of interest until it's feeding time.

 

[anthrodisiac]

better lore than vore.

If you think my 300-page lore book is a lot, well, you're in for a bit of a shock...

 

[Voboy]

I feel so called out and/or seen. I'm not even a plotter, I just pants an ungodly amount of lore for no reason but my own amusement.

Same.

 

[crookedletter]

Draft 1 is so rough. It's basically just a core idea, some character work and a list of sorts of things or scenes that needs to happen.

I think this is where the dichotomy between pantsing and plotting gets muddled a bit. It comes down to a question of what your first draft looks like.

I will call myself a pantser, I do not enjoy writing outlines. If I want to work out what my story is going to be, and who's going to be in it, and what's going to happen, I just have to write it. Sometimes -- when I'm lucky, or in a good flow, or just when my story doesn't end up deviating much from my original conception -- what comes out in that first draft is pretty close to the complete story. It's nice, when that happens. Other times it's an unholy mess and you might as well just call it an outline.

When it's the latter I think the pansting and plotting processes aren't so dissimilar. You write your outline knowing full well it's not the finished product; I write my sloppy first draft suspecting the same but hoping it will be close. Either way, there's often more work to be done.

It might be inefficient. But my goal isn't mass production. I spend as long on each story as it calls for. Sometimes they pop right out, and that's fun. Most of the time, it's a process.

 

[Erozetta]

I suspect you and I and Kitty might be the only ones like this. Most AHers seem to outline and plan, make notes, do character boards, edit until the story is there (or edit it out of existence). I also suspect they might not quite believe us when we say editing is only to catch the typos!

Not the only ones.

I often don't even have an idea when I first sit down to write. I just see what happens as I start typing.

 

[Britva415]

I think this is where the dichotomy between pantsing and plotting gets muddled a bit. It comes down to a question of what your first draft looks like.

I think you're on to something.

How to meaningfully distinguish between an outline without any first-draft versus a prose first-draft written without any outline? Both of them establish the plot and get fleshed out in subsequent drafts. Who's to say the outline wasn't pantsed?

Unless by "pantser" we're literally and exclusively talking about someone who writes a draft and immediately and unselfcritically just goes and publishes it.

 

[crookedletter]

Unless by "pantser" we're literally and exclusively talking about someone who writes a draft and immediately and unselfcritically just goes and publishes it.

There must be another term for those: “pantsers on fire”?

 

[TheLobster]

The ancient conflict aside, I'm admittedly quite confused how anyone could mistake an outline for a draft or vice versa.

Like, isn't the former simply a listing of what is supposed to happen in a story, as opposed to a draft which is, you know, an actual written story? Aren't we talking bullet points vs. paragraphs? Isolated sentences vs. continuous prose? Mechanical words vs. words with meaning?

Sure, I don't outline much, but each time that I do I end up with something akin to hierarchical list that's nowhere near to real, finished draft. So how exactly can one say that a first draft is just an outline? It doesn't compute in my small crustacean brain.