That Moment: Wait, this is much better ...

I don't agree. As a new writer, I spent more than three years writing a series and publishing the chapters (36 of them) as I finished them.

There is no doubt in my mind that I improved as a writer because of the regular feedback I received during that time. Had I sat alone for three years, putting down words which no one was reading, I doubt very much if I would have made the kind of progress I achieved. In fact, it's unlikely I would have finished it at all.

But you don't do it any more. If you kept writing that way you would pretty much cap yourself. Plus, you wrote it largely to push yourself and test yourself. You're on record saying that. You might be the only one on lit who really challenged yourself that way. The rest who post as they go do it mostly because it's the quickest line between typing something and getting scores.

We hear these calls all the time.

"I need the feedback for inspiration for the next chapter."

"The feedback has dried up so I've lost the motivation to continue the story."

Were you not inspired to tell a story? What happened to that story? The reality is that they never had much of a story and were inspired with an idea of a character and a setting and a plot bunny and couldn't resist the short cut to see if anyone likes it, because they just want someone to like it. That is the motivation. Now that people aren't liking it, the motivation is gone since that was the prime motivation all along. These are dead giveaways for why people write. Do you have a story that you want to tell or do you just want someone to like something that you submitted and tell you that you're good?

I'm going to get a little spiritual here but this is the truth. True inspiration is positive energy (ethereal), therefore not bound by time, so it can wait until it's done. Instant gratification is impatient because the applause is negative energy (material) - at least the energy that the ego looks to harvest is - therefore dissipates (and dies) over time, hence the impatience to hurry and finish. If one understands the basics of sin and virtue (they are terribly misunderstood - religion has twisted them so horribly) then it becomes easy to spot this stuff. But people don't like it when you spot it and point it out, because they are writing from their ego more than they think they are and the ego doesn't like being outed so it tells its host to get angry at the messenger. So when people get butthurt, that gets pretty easy to spot the ego too. So you point that out and ... they get butthurter and angrier ... That's just how us humans roll - at least until we figure it out.
 
People can write their own way, not everyone is a plotter and some people can write and adjust on the fly. In fact for some, it can be fun or seen as a challenge to work around things as you go.

This is not the pantser vs plotter debate. A true pantser can easily complete an entire epic story and edit it all before posting any of it. Pantsing is perfectly 100% valid and I say that as a devoted plotter. No problems, no judgement from me.

The argument that Bobby and I have always seemed to agree on (and we haven't agreed on everything) is simply that when you finish everything first before submitting any, you give yourself every opportunity to make the story as good as it can be. When you post as you go, you only have one chance to make it perfect the first time. You handcuff yourself, whether you pants or plot, no different.
 
Like so many other concepts, the idea of pantser vs plotter is a spectrum that at its core is a binary. The reality is that well all live somewhere in the middle. Very few of us are 100 percent either.

Absolutely agree. When I write a shorter story, say under 10k words, I'm probably closer to 90% plotter but when I write something over 30k words, I'm probably closer to 65% plotter.
 
I'm sure on the other side, even the most detailed plotter has moments of sliding off the plan and realizing it made the piece better.

Absolutely I do! The longer and more complex the plot becomes, the harder it is to connect the pieces properly unless you know the characters well enough. So sometimes the only way to know the characters well enough is to write a couple of scenes with them. Then you can figure out how to connect the scenes (although I'll usually roughly plot the scenes before I write them).

I am not proud at all. I will take a good idea any bloody way that it will come. It just so happens that for me that usually works out to plotting. I also have a much easier time getting the actual prose down if I know where it's going, so any time that I can frame something up before I start, it helps me big time. But that's just me.
 
writing is not formulaic.. you’re right.. anyone who tells you what you should be doing isn’t telling you anything.. may the force be with you!!

For the record, I never told her, or anyone else for that matter, to do anything.
 
When I first started writing fiction, I was sure that I'd be a plotter. I expected to create highly polished, perfect outlines, and then just turn them into stories without much deviation. I turn out to be mostly a pantser. I know how a few scenes might go, and then I write and discover what the story is as I go. It was surprising.

--Annie
I'm right (write?) there with you. And when I started writing I was very much that plotter. The plot and every scene was outlined and then written. But as I've matured in this hobby, I've moved away from that approach because I have more confidence in myself. I'm not afraid to start a story with just an idea and an opening scene in mind.

I'll never be a true pantser where I can create a story from "It was a dark and stormy night," and go from there, where I have no plan for the story. Can't do it. My stream of consciousness has a lot of locks and dams in it. Every story has a plan, but it's very loose. If the story morphs in act 2, then I make the changes in act 1 and carry on.

It's intensely satisfying and when the story ends in a way I hadn't expected when I wrote the opening scenes I feel rather proud of myself. My writing journey has been very rewarding and I can't see myself ever stopping now.
 
You have to have some 'plan' before you write, but not everyone outlines of follows the 'rules'

I'm sure on the other side, even the most detailed plotter has moments of sliding off the plan and realizing it made the piece better.

But if we blend the two types together, we don't get fun debates.

I think the only difference between pantsers and plotters is the amount of pre-writing consideration and the point at which decisions are made. Where a pantser comes to that "what should happen now?" moment in the middle of their writing, a plotter has probably considered what they would do then in advance. The difference is really little more than timing.
 
I am a new-ish writer. I am sitting on the forums right now avoiding going back and rewriting a whole chunk I wrote yesterday. This is the first time I have realized overnight that I needed to do this. My only other section I have rewritten for content/story was one that I was uncomfortable with and I sought feedback from my spouse, rewriting a difficult section based on their feedback.
I feel like I could have written this, lol.

I wrote a non-sex scene yesterday and I am completely revising it now because I spent all night tossing and turning thinking it was shitty and went nowhere. I even reached out to the unquenchable Penny Thompson to give me a beta read because I don’t know if he scene works at all.

It’s weird how you can do hundreds of thousands of words with no second guessing and then suddenly, for whatever reason, you can’t do what you did before and you struggle.

This writing thing is weird sometimes.
 
When I first started writing fiction, I was sure that I'd be a plotter. I expected to create highly polished, perfect outlines, and then just turn them into stories without much deviation. I turn out to be mostly a pantser. I know how a few scenes might go, and then I write and discover what the story is as I go. It was surprising.

--Annie

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And those who do will remain writers addicted to instant applause and their writing will suffer for it. That's okay. It's hobby writing after all.

When I did my series, the applause had nothing to do with why I did or didn't keep going. In fact, even now, I get fairly frequent emails to the effect that I should pick it up again. I won't, but the demand is plainly there.

I finished that series because I felt like I needed to, and I finished it my way. I remain proud of it. If I was just aiming for accolades, I'd still be churning it out every 1-14 months, like I used to.

I'm sure there are writers who behave just like you're saying here. Most of us who post here aren't those writers.
 
The idea that publishing when the story is complete is the only and bestest way to go seems to ignore the number of successful professional authors who've published their stories in multiple volumes.
 
The idea that publishing when the story is complete is the only and bestest way to go seems to ignore the number of successful professional authors who've published their stories in multiple volumes.
Imagining trying to read GoT as a single book..... 😬
 
I think the only difference between pantsers and plotters is the amount of pre-writing consideration and the point at which decisions are made. Where a pantser comes to that "what should happen now?" moment in the middle of their writing, a plotter has probably considered what they would do then in advance. The difference is really little more than timing.
Sometimes, sure.

Everyone is different and as I get older my ADHD has gotten worse and I refuse medication (various reasons) and my focus is even more scattered. Years ago I co-wrote a long story with another lit writer and we would chat through Yahoo (wow, yeah) and she told me my mind was like a box of squirrels all chasing a different nut, so I think I'm more scattershot than most people.

This is a thread I posed last year or so about how I'll start something with nothing but a 'concept' with nothing to go with it

https://forum.literotica.com/threads/being-a-panster-to-the-nth-degree.1619993/
 
Or The Wheel of Time.

Or most Dickens books. And Trollope. And Eliot. And Dostoevsky.

And Dumas, and Thackeray, and Tom Wolfe if you don't like the old guys.

There are a ton of major authors and classic novels that were serializations.

Why? For the money. These guys were selling the stories to magazines and papers and they got paid for every chapter.

I guess that could be the equivalent of PSG's 'writing for the likes' thing, given we don't get paid here and our currency tends to be views and stars.

In the end though, I don't think anybody is going to complain that Great Expectations suffers from the fact that Dickens didn't write the entire thing and then publish it as a book. Hell, he blew deadlines on The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist when a friend of his (who may have been more) died and he was grief stricken. Makes me not feel as bad blowing one of my own deadlines last week for my Oasis series.

I like the process of sitting down each week with a blank canvass, notes on where the journey is supposed to go, and a deadline to meet. And I know, regardless of whether anybody gives a shit (and this third series has the lowest engagement of any of mine so far, so I may be straining what my readers are willing to put up with) I'm going to finish because I - probably even more than my readers - want to know how my characters get from where they are now to where they end up (the ending is already written, of course).

There's room for every style, and there's no right or wrong way to do anything (other than the oxford comma, which is objectively correct).
 
No need to, seeing the series will never finish no one has to bother starting it unless they just want to waste time.
We'll have to agree to disagree on this one. Even in it's current state, GoT is absolutely worth reading. World building, character development, story telling on an epic scale with a quality I haven't found outside Tolkien. GRRM, is a fricking genius. One I'm very perturbed with right now for reasons you are alluding to, but a master all the same.
 
Some might consider it more of a personal preference than a lesson.
That's true, and I don't begrudge anyone for how they choose to tell their tale.

However, there are a lot of new writers here who could benefit from the experiences of others. Being impatient and writing themselves into a corner isn't usually a preference, but something that one experiences, and hopefully learns how to avoid it in the future.
 
I think the only difference between pantsers and plotters is the amount of pre-writing consideration and the point at which decisions are made. Where a pantser comes to that "what should happen now?" moment in the middle of their writing, a plotter has probably considered what they would do then in advance. The difference is really little more than timing.
Churning prose out is a slow process. On the other hand, imagining something is fast. As someone who is probably as far along the 'plotter' end of the spectrum as is realistically possible, my process tends to have several stages. I've talked a fair bit about the really high level initial stuff in other posts (and compaired it to assemblig a jigsaw with infinite pieces and infinite outcomes), but once I've got a rough idea of what the story is going to be like in terms of core concepts and unique selling points, I can imagine a scene fragment or two during a half-an-hour walk. And I might imagine the same scene several times in slightly different ways on successive days. And, as a scene moves from cloudy to clear and increasingly becomes more and more fixed as 'having happened that way', that has a greater impact on all the other fragments of scenes knocking around my head that spiderweb out into a nebulous multiverse of a plot possibilities...

I'm sure on the other side, even the most detailed plotter has moments of sliding off the plan and realizing it made the piece better.

When I start writing, I have a general structure in mind for a story/structure/plot that I'm confident 'could' work. That doesn't mean it's necessarily optimal, and I may have concerns about it (Is this bit going to be too long?, Can I actually pull off the emotional punch that I'm imagining?). And, even with a fixed plot since writing can take weeks or months, of course I'm going to have flashes of inspiration sometimes. And I frequently have alternate plot structures in mind that I've not gone with. The point with having a structure is that you can mentally map out any potential change and see 1) 'is it really better' and 2) 'how much rewriting vs how much better' and make a decision about it relatively fast. And even as a plotter I'm going to listen to my beta readers if they are telling me something really isn't working.

I'm currently in the middle of probably the largest rewrite I've ever done on a story. Three out of four of my beta readers gave it a kicking and when that happens, there's not a lot of point protesting that they're wrong. I'm not going to bore people with the plot but it's a first time MFF threesome story and the the feedback back was basically a) the male MC comes across as a jerk b) the MC and the girlfriend needed to talk more about the plot-driving conflict and c) the 'unicorn' needed to have way more agency. I set it aside for nearly six months to ponder on and at the end of last last week, my subconscious spat out the answer, or rather a long series of answers (during a period that I had an hugely important deadline at work that I was working overtime on - I can get my subconscious to focus and work hard - I just can't tell it what to focus on...). I started with a 13k story, now have an 18k story which is 95% done. As I rewrote it I highlighted anything from the original that I'd checked, which still worked in blue, and any new additions in green. With the Word document open at minimum zoom and multiple pages open, I now have a document which is about half blue and half green - with way more blue at the beginning and almost none towards the end. Even here, though I've been fairly methodical about changing from one structure to the other. I think the piece is way more improved, but, again, I'll see what others make of it, once I've polished off the final little bit sometime next week.

At a high level, structurally things both have and haven't changed. The scenes progress from an office to a restaurant to a nightclub to a bedroom back to a final epilogue back at the office. And at most of those transitions between scenes the conflicts/heat between the characters is roughly the same. On the other hand, some information has had to be pushed way back to become a revelation, and equally stuff I'd expected to reveal in a sequel actually helped this story along (to the point where it's no longer clear that particular sequel is necessary), stakes at the outset had to be raised so that where characters talk to each other and negotiate they've got actual ground to give and so on. And in the nightclub who was dancing with whom and who was watching and in what order had to be reworked, but not thrown away.

Err, that was kind of longer than I intended. I think the general point was that plotting doesn't prevent rewriting.
 
My son, who has read the books, keeps telling me the same thiing. Maybe I'm hallucating. :ROFLMAO:
I made it through the first nine and a half books, plus the prequel - in both its forms, for those who know, plus the graphic novel - and I think the best way to approach it is as the same story, just a turn of the Wheel later. The details are different, but the story's the same.

And besides a few bumpy moments in S1, I've enjoyed the whole thing so far.
 
That's true, and I don't begrudge anyone for how they choose to tell their tale.

However, there are a lot of new writers here who could benefit from the experiences of others. Being impatient and writing themselves into a corner isn't usually a preference, but something that one experiences, and hopefully learns how to avoid it in the future.
On the other hand, a lot of new writers also benefit from just getting something out there. Saying "Now I'm going to publish" and taking that leap for the very first time. Once they've done that, they'll quite possibly be more motivated to keep writing and publishing, rather than running out of steam, giving up and never publishing anything.
 
I think it takes me about a year more or less, to finish and submit each story. I could do it much faster, but I write 3 or 4 stories at a time and push aside the ones I find less interesting, saved for another day...and I'm old and slow and just not that good at it. I find it difficult to end a story, I want to make changes, add characters that makes the story longer, too long...It isn't a book it's a short story.
 
And those who do will remain writers addicted to instant applause and their writing will suffer for it. That's okay. It's hobby writing after all.
Feedback is critical for most new writers. I wish that more would reach out before they published and that more veteran writers would be accessible to them.
 
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