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.

 

[Britva415]

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.

I'm not saying they're the same thing, I'm saying there is an extent to which they do the same thing. I'm also saying "pantsing" applies to anything that's a first "try," including the first draft of an outline.

 

[TheRedChamber]

@Britva415

I'm not saying they're the same thing, I'm saying there is an extent to which they do the same thing. I'm also saying "pantsing" applies to anything that's a first "try," including the first draft of an outline.

Unless you boil it down to 'producing anything anyhow is an iterative process and thus essentially the same,' I'm not sure you are right about this. Generally, for me, an outline document isn't something that I'm using to work out ideas. It's a place to record ideas I've already had so that I don't forget them. Plotting time is any time for me that I'm not actively doing something else (car to work, ten-minute break in a meeting etc.) where I retreat into my head and hammer things out. I might be working on a high concept level ('how does a nice girl get involved in [that deviant sexual act]' I might be working on character and motivation to bring someone to the scene I want to happen (and, before anyone says anything, they can derail it if they come up with a better idea of how they want to act). I might also just be imagining a particular scene and running through dialogue in my head. You could argue that this is all just 'pantsing in my head,' but, since it is very rarely linear and rarely attends to all aspects of a story (e.g. scene setting, description, prose, dialogue etc.) at the same time, I'm not sure it would count.

I do occasionally pants to some degree if I've got a scene that is complete in terms of all those aspects, but which I don't know where it goes later. But I tend to start with a very fixed entry point and end point to each scene with a list of things I want to establish along the way. I've tried to stop doing this for individual scenes as it has led to me having a whole bunch of fragments that never get added to.

 

[Voboy]

Generally, for me, an outline document isn't something that I'm using to work out ideas. It's a place to record ideas I've already had so that I don't forget them.

This precisely.

I occasionally amuse myself, on finishing a story, by comparing the final result to the initial blurb I had written after the idea for the story first caught my mind.

It's usually not really all that close, lol.

 

[SimonDoom]

I would love to be able to say I write like Steven King. That I could just pick up a blank piece of paper, start with a couple of words and see where that takes me. I've come to learn through the years that I'm more of an outliner.

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.

Draft 2 is detailing those scenes one by one, occasionally jumping inbetween when inspiration strikes.

In Draft 3 there is a story but I'm working on the voices of the characters, figuring out their progression, making the dialogue human rather than just having everyone say exactly what they were thinking out loud.

By draft 4 and 5, the prose gets polished and the story actually start becoming coherent.

It's not lost on me how terribly inefficient and slow my process is. I wish I could just find a better way to activate my few braincells. Can anyone relate? And if you also are an outliner, what ways have you found to actually improve your process?

Yes I relate. Keep in mind that Stephen King has been writing compulsively since he was young. Practice may not make you perfect, but it will make you better. Keep at it, keep improving, and have fun with the process even if the result isn't perfect.

 

[OddLove]

I abandon more stories than I finish. It's not even close. And even the stories I finished, I've had to go all the way back to the beginning and completely shift direction because it just didn't go anywhere exciting. How someone like Stephen King can just crap out books like that is a genuinely mystery to me. Part of me suspects he's just writing very rough drafts and outlines, then shipping 'concepts' off to teams of editors.

But that's just me being super skeptical because I can't fathom that level of productivity along with quality. Maybe he's just that magical of a writer. A prodigy.

 

[deathlynx]

AC/DC?
Seriously, I write both ways depending on what it is I'm working on. For my short stories, I definitely fall into the pants category. I may bounce around a bit in the actual writing process, as a solid idea comes for the later part of the story, but I have no outline or anything. Not even for my series of short stories. And yes, it truly is pantsing because when I go back through and edit/re-read, I don't tend to make very many changes except minor grammatical issues.

For longer pieces, I plot. Didn't used to, because my muse was content that I'd gotten the idea out of my head when I tried to write an outline. Over the years, however, my outlines have become more and more detailed. @TheLobster my outlines are much closer to paragraph style than bullet points because they tend to be about a paragraph long description for each chapter. A lot of my need to form an outline came from the realization that it's much easier for me to cut than add while editing. If I want a story to be anything resembling novel length I need to make sure there's enough there, because inevitably what comes out while going from outline to draft (which, like my short stories, is fairly close to my final edit) is more likely to be shorter than I expect than it is to extend.

Incidentally, while I do my share of world-building, most of it tends to come organically as I write, rather than prepared in advance. If I have a B5 style story arc, that much will be planned out but otherwise all the little bits and pieces get noted in the encyclopedia/lexicon as I go, just so I don't mess up later.

 

[JohnBJohn]

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.

Well, you have your basic outline which is basically a list of ideas, plot points, etc. A detailed outline adds more and I've seen outlines where they have enough detail and written words to drop whole portions into the final text.

I do have one superheroine series with a fairly detailed outline of how I want the story to progress. Right now I have 4 chapters more or less outlined (Ch4 only has 2 bullets, but Ch 3 actually lays out a fight that the heroine spectacularly loses as she gets f*cked.)

Most of my other 'outlines' are really just a series of bullets.

 

[JohnBJohn]

I definitely vary between a pantser and an outliner. Sometimes as I'm writing a series, I'll have an idea for another chapter (each chapter is its own adventure), so I'll capture the idea as a series of bullets and expand on them as I build on the idea. It makes writing the next chapter easier.

Other times I'll have a vague idea of the plot, but I let the characters dictate how things turn out and I don't always know where things are going, where they will end up or when I'll be finished. My series High School Friends was written this way and it wasn't until Ch3 (of 4) that I knew what the end goal was. I didn't know how I'd get there until I started writing that final chapter.

When I do have a number of plot points that I want to hit, I'll place them at the end of my writing so it's really easy to refer to my notes. As i go, I'll do a lot of self-editing and will have read the entire thing about 4 times. The second and third passes are used to flesh out details, fix plot points and make sure everything fits properly. The final review is pure spelling and grammar.