Trust the pants (if you're a pantser)

[intim8]

In another thread, the topic of pantsing and endings came up, but I don't want to completely derail that thread, so I will put this here.

One of the points made there is that pantsing, discovery writing, relies on discovering the conflict and the ending. Occasionally it will start with those, but more typically, for myself and some others I've seen describe it, we don't even have that much to start with.

This "discover the conflict" thing just happened to me today, during a day of writing since my last comment on that other thread this morning. I've been pantsing a scenario idea that I liked. A light, happy situation with lots of potential for sex, but I had only the vaguest idea where it could go, just a certain scene, really, not even a whole plot.

The pantsing was going nowhere, but I kept on, knowing that if not the whole thing, then at least half of what I was writing would end up on the cutting room floor. But I knew there was something there, so I kept looking for it.

As I went, describing relatively mundane events, a couple of things happened, and one of them turned out to not work at all with the vague idea I had of where this could go. Typically, I would spackle over such disconnects, but no, that's dumb. I've trained myself to watch for that, because that is where the opportunities are.

I looked at it and realized that the reason it wouldn't work was that the MC would be doing something he really shouldn't do, something that would pit a short-term goal against a long-term goal. A smart, rational person who tries to avoid conflict and doing the wrong thing would do one or the other, but not both.

Duh....

I took twenty minutes of sitting and pondering it, and, yeah, there's a real meaningful conflict there if I escalate both the short term and long term events and stakes. Real "human condition" stuff. It turns the story pretty dark, but that's a good thing. Entirely different than the bright, cheery romp I first pictured, but once the MC does both things, he finds himself in an increasingly disturbing situation that puts his long-term goal, not to mention his integrity, at risk.

I have more or less the whole course of the story in my head now, and, yeah, I will have to cut half of what I wrote to this point, and rewrite the other half, but it's worth it. Whenever I trust the pants, things work out, 90% of the time. Whenever I try to plot first, I get stuck and just dig the hole deeper. Often for weeks or more.

It changes the category it will fit into also. I don't have a working title, but it will probably be my first entry into I/T, a category I didn't think I'd be writing in.

 

[AG31]

One of the points made there is that pantsing, discovery writing, relies on discovering the conflict and the ending.

I've never figured out what "pantsing" is. And now I can't figure out what "discovery writing" is. And I can't figure out what it means to "discover the conflect and the ending."

I read your post carefully, hoping it would all come clear. But it didn't. Too abstract. Could you take each of those phrases and give me examples?

 

[AwkwardlySet]

I've never figured out what "pantsing" is.

Pantser is a writer who doesn't outline their ideas and doesn't really plan their story before writing it. Pantser just writes and lets the inspiration take them wherever it takes them. The opposite would be a writer who is a plotter. Plotters plan their stories, create an outline, detailed or not, but either way, they have a clear plan where they want to go with their story.
This is just a rough explanation. There are nuances to this, of course.

 

[intim8]

I've never figured out what "pantsing" is. And now I can't figure out what "discovery writing" is. And I can't figure out what it means to "discover the conflect and the ending."

I read your post carefully, hoping it would all come clear. But it didn't. Too abstract. Could you take each of those phrases and give me examples?

@AwkwardlySet pretty much got it, but I'll elaborate, because it is often hard for people who aren't panters (write by the seat of your pants) to get how literal it is.

Take an idea. Not an idea for a story (though that happens too). Just an idea for a situation, or a scene. For instance, literally all I had for the story referred to inthe OP was one scene and a situation.

Literally nothing more than: a nudist family moves in next door to the MC, and the daughter gives MC a blowjob in the backyard, in front of the brother and MC's sister.

Not a thing more. I started writing. First line: "when the Bradleys moved in next door, we didn't think much of it". Maybe not a great opening, but it gets the ball roling, the process started.

"Discover" refers to the idea that all the elements associated with a story, characters, setting, plot, conflict, etc, are discovered as you write. The conscious and the subconscious fill in things as you go.

That initial premise implies a lot of questions. I answer them as I go, and each answer carries more implications. I wrote 4K words before I hit on what I described in the OP. I'd discovered a central conflict in the story. I'd discovered 8 characters. They'll need tweaking, but their basic qualities are there. The conflict and story line I discovered arose from all eight of them.

I could never have arrived at that by sitting down and outlining a story. Just can't do it. Some people can, some people, it's the only way they can. Pantsers and plotters, vive la diiference.

 

[ElectricBlue]

I've never figured out what "pantsing" is. And now I can't figure out what "discovery writing" is. And I can't figure out what it means to "discover the conflect and the ending."

I read your post carefully, hoping it would all come clear. But it didn't. Too abstract. Could you take each of those phrases and give me examples?

Writing from the very slightest idea, to see where it takes you. I'm a pure pantser.

You might not know that from my stories - but there are only two that had a known ending - my Arthurian myth re-tell (where I had to get the dead king to the side of a lake, so the Lady of the Lake could put his corpse on a boat and take it to a grave somewhere) - and that's not how the story actually ends. And an auto-biographical piece where i knew how it ended because she's not with me.

If you like, you can pick any story and I can say what was in my mind when I started it.

 

[Erozetta]

Pantsing sometimes starts with no ideas on a story.

Most of the time I simply sit down to a blank page with nothing on my mind and start writing. Whatever happens, happens, I can fix it later.

Then other times I have a dream lingering in the back of my mind that I want to write out.

Rarely I'll think on an idea for a while until I get to a point where I *have* to write it or I won't be able to sleep. That's as plotty as I get.

 

[SimonDoom]

If it works for you, then nobody can tell you that you're doing it wrong. I'm not going to do that.

I do it a different way, with lots of plotting, and I think it works for me.

I'd just say this, apropos of the other thread started by TarnishedPenny, which I think was the genesis for this thread: if something's not working, don't be afraid to try a different method.

 

[intim8]

Another example, since @AG31 asked, is my Aces series. It started withe the virus and a one line description of the MC. Each chapter was pantsed and posted with having no idea where the next would go. (It shows in a few places).

The entire sub-plot with Lisa came out of just needing three new chsracters for chapter four. None of them were planned. Just started typing with, "the door to my library burst open, and in walked a naked, dripping woman"

Lisa was born, and developed as the story went. And that horrible scene at the beginning of chapter 5 was my answer to: how do I get out of the corner I just painted myself in to? It wasn't planned.

 

[SimonDoom]

One of the fun things about the creative process is that it can't be reduced to any universal formulas. You can't reduce it to a one-size-fits-all TED talk. The very idea is preposterous. I like that about it.

I don't know how you pantsers do it. I've tried, briefly, to do it that way, and it's hopeless and frustrating I give it up. But I'm the kind of English nerd that thinks sentence diagramming is neat.

I'm curious to know: when you do it this way, how does the story arc fall into place? Do you ever feel dissatisfied with the method? Are you usually satisfied with the ending you arrive at?

 

[ShelbyDawn57]

I've never figured out what "pantsing" is. And now I can't figure out what "discovery writing" is. And I can't figure out what it means to "discover the conflect and the ending."

I read your post carefully, hoping it would all come clear. But it didn't. Too abstract. Could you take each of those phrases and give me examples?

George R. R. Martin calls it gardening as opposed to architecting. An architect will plan out their story in detail, plot points, character descriptions, all of that. A gardener, or pantser, will get a general idea for the story and may scope out the main characters, but lets the plot develop as a plant would grow. The characters tell the writer who they are as he/she gets to know them. It's all very organic and, IMHO, very exciting. That's how I write.

As an example, my latest submission, Savage Daughter, started as a nice little short story. Then I decided I needed a stronger tie between the MC and her mother. I went looking for a mother / daughter song and found 'My Mother's Savage Daughter.' It was so perfect, it took over the story, almost becoming a character in itself. Complexities I had never envisioned emerged, whole new story lines. That little short story is now a 40K+ short novel, and may be the best thing I've written. I love gardening...

 

[Voboy]

I'm writing a Halloween piece and I put a throwaway character in at the beginning to act as a bridge between the protagonist and the woman he'll end up fucking. I meant this other character to be nothing but a name and some chatter, but I've found her handy about three other times; just today, when mulling how I was going to have the two main characters start getting physical, I realized this other character could yet again serve as a catalyst.

So? I just bopped on back to an earlier point, added a phrase or two of foreshadowing, and presto! Plot knot untied. On to the next one.

That, @AG31, is pantsing: you write things down, trusting that they'll help you out later, and because your mind is open as you write? They do end up helping you out later. That kind of thing has happened to me more times than I can count. I started writing this story with, perhaps, two sentences that spelled out a very mundane idea involving a man being unable to fully understand what a woman with an accent is saying to him. Now I'm up over 20k words and it's going well.

 

[ShelbyDawn57]

I'm curious to know: when you do it this way, how does the story arc fall into place? Do you ever feel dissatisfied with the method? Are you usually satisfied with the ending you arrive at?

We're all different. Even my IRL conversations are tangential.

As for how it works, I just write, following the story as it shows itself to me. Sometimes I hit dead ends. I'll let those sit for a while. Most of the time, they resolve. Having said that, I have so many stories that have led me into corners that I honestly don't see a way out of. What starts as a flash of brilliance soon turns into a burnt out light bulb. Was that wasted effort? I don't think so as many of my best ideas come to me while I'm following a tendril of another story.

Caveat, Then there's my epic fantasy novel. Forty thousand words in search of a direction. I wish I could plan it out. I might get somewhere with it.

 

[Voboy]

I'm curious to know: when you do it this way, how does the story arc fall into place? Do you ever feel dissatisfied with the method? Are you usually satisfied with the ending you arrive at?

For me, the ending usually suggests itself when I'm about 10-15k words in. I'll go write that down, either as a summary or in its final form, and then I'll just work on ways to fill in the gap between the early part of the piece and the ending I've decided on. It all goes stream of consciousness. I'm satisfied with my completed stories about 95% of the time. I've only got four stories done and in the can that I won't publish because they aren't good enough for me, though they're probably perfectly okay stories if I'm being objective.

My overall failure rate is around 30%; those are stories I start that don't reach publication. I usually realize they're dead ends within about the first 3-5k words.

 

[NotWise]

All my stories before Lit, and the first several stories after I started writing for Lit were written by the seat of my pants. I tired of the long editing/rewriting chores; I wanted more complex plots and more complex characters. So I started laying out the stories. I wanted readers to know that stories ended where I ended them, so I started writing to an end. The transition took a long time, Now I'll brainstorm my way through an initial synopsis, but I don't write by the seat of my pants.

 

[intim8]

I'm curious to know: when you do it this way, how does the story arc fall into place? Do you ever feel dissatisfied with the method? Are you usually satisfied with the ending you arrive at?

Those are more complicated questions than they seem.

First, I don't necessarily pants the whole story start to finish then just publish it. Though that does happen. I think the majority of the stories I have published here were done like that, even the first story I published here at 19K words. What you see is basically the rough draft, except for some light line editing and of course spell/grammar checking. In some cases, there was probably a bit more, paragraph level stuff, but I don't think any of them I did even so much as change, rearrange, or rewrite scenes. A few of these stories were started and posted in the same day, or the next day.

But, a lot of the time, the pantsing results in something that needs a fair amount of work. This one I discuss above is a good example. The pantsing process hasn't resulted in a story, it resulted in half a very rough draft and half a mental outline. The real work starts from there, and from here on it gets a lot more similar to a plotter.

As to satisfaction, even that doesn't really work the same way. In one sense, it can't fail. Because there's rarely a specific story that is either successfully written or not. There's an idea that either becomes a story or it doesn't. Probably three out of four of my pantsing starts don't become stories. "Fail early and fail often" as the tech companies used to say. A few thousand words (a handful of hours of work), and it was a nice try, but no go. If it got up to nine out of ten or something, I might have to reconsider the method. But if that one out of ten was pure gold, it might still be worth it.

This story almost went that way, but I didn't want to give it up. The story arc falls into place in the way I described in the OP. Now that I know what the heart of the story is, I'm doing some of plotting, but I will still rely on, lets call it, "guided pantsing" to flesh it out (and to redo the first ~4K words to better fit). Then I'll edit the result. Maybe heavily, maybe not.

And all those no-go starts, they get archived, and sometimes revived. My latest story was one of those (after sitting for a couple of years), and it is my best recieved story so far, by a lot. "Hey Nineteen" was another, though I think it is one of my weaker efforts. I just yanked another one out of limbo today, and will look it over for potential after this one is done.

Forty thousand words in search of a direction. I wish I could plan it out. I might get somewhere with it.

I've been experimenting on longer stuff with extracting an outline from the pantsed writing, then rearranging the outline and filling in blanks, removing extraneous stuff, just basically tightening it up and pointing it in a useful direction. It's a hell of a lot of work, but I've had some success, at least with getting the story straight in my head. Though so far, mostly due to time constraints (these are longer works, over 100K and one as much as 300K), I haven't done much follow up with subsequently writing it out.

 

[ElectricBlue]

One of the fun things about the creative process is that it can't be reduced to any universal formulas. You can't reduce it to a one-size-fits-all TED talk. The very idea is preposterous. I like that about it.

Agree - which is why, when someone speaks in universals and absolutes, I know they just haven't figured out that not all people think like they do.

I don't know how you pantsers do it. I've tried, briefly, to do it that way, and it's hopeless and frustrating I give it up. But I'm the kind of English nerd that thinks sentence diagramming is neat.

Lol!

The only time I actually put a set of "completion notes" at the bottom of a stalled story, to see if they would help, I ignored the lot and the story went somewhere else.

I'm curious to know: when you do it this way, how does the story arc fall into place?

Usually within 1000 - 1500 words, the thing has a direction. Although I've got several stories where a new character has appeared from nowhere, who has wriggled her way (always a woman) into the story as an equal lead.

Do you ever feel dissatisfied with the method?

Not yet.

Are you usually satisfied with the ending you arrive at?

Always. That's when the story has reached its natural end. The trick, being a pantser, is to know when to stop. Those long endless story guys haven't figured that one out yet.

 

[intim8]

I don't know how you pantsers do it. I've tried, briefly, to do it that way, and it's hopeless and frustrating I give it up. But I'm the kind of English nerd that thinks sentence diagramming is neat.

Long before pantsing was a thing, long before word processers were a thing (pantsing for real was probably impractical in the days of typewriters), I had the best English teacher ever, in middle school.

His standing weekly assignment: fill a page with words. Any words, didn't matter, so long as the page was filled and it was words, not pictures.

God, was that fun. Zero pressure, so I just wrote whatever came to mind, as fast as it came (in ballpoint pen). Didn't matter if it was a story or not, but it usually was, at least kinda.

Decades later, I did NaNoWriMo. Same exact assignment, except 50K words and a month to do it in. God was that fun. I did 75K of a coherent, if pretty scattered story that was almost a novel if it only had an ending. No going back and fixing even the most obvious typos or incorrectnesses. No going back and fixing plot points that made no sense, or anything like that.

And I discovered things writing it. The seminal moment was when my MC shocked me so badly that I had to step away from the desk for a little bit. He did a violent, awful thing that I never saw coming (coldly and calculatedly broke both of someone's legs, on his own initiative, just to curry favor with a gang). But when I came back to it, I realized it made sense.

And thus a pantser was discovered.

It's a mindset, and a tough one to get into because it is both counter-intuitive and goes against everything learned about writing. I had the advantage of both of the experiences above. No, I'm not saying you should just work on it and become a pantser. You have what works for you, and it seems pretty successful. Keep at it.

I'm just saying that if you ever want to try again, think about really clearing your head of all the preconcieved ideas (including sentence diagramming). And try it on something totally trivial, of no consequence at all. That's how I approach all my starts. And when I don't, it goes nowhere.

 

[Erozetta]

I don't know how you pantsers do it.

Obvious answer is "By the seat of our pants."

I'm curious to know: when you do it this way, how does the story arc fall into place? Do you ever feel dissatisfied with the method? Are you usually satisfied with the ending you arrive at?

I've had a few comments on how much a reader loved my endings... Confession time: I end stories when I run out of ideas for it. If the characters stop talking to me, then I've told all of their story they wanted me to tell and it's done.

As far as the arc... It just kinda happens naturally?

Dissatisfied only when an editor sends back a note that the ending needs to be more concrete, so I send it back with a "The End" typed in at the end. But, only dissatisfied until they come back and call me a cheeky bitch for it. (Not in those words, but basically "haha very funny, give it an ending..."

 

[Mal_Bey]

And, like most things, Pantsing and Planning is a continuum. I fall somewhere in the middle. I always think of my process as similar to professional slalom skiing. To tell my story, I know I have to figure out a way to ski through these 10 plot-point gates. Often the path this planning results in is obvious, and then you have to have the skill to write/ski it the best way. When you find yourself climbing uphill, you know your skiing/writng has gone off-course. It may be you did something stupid and went the wrong way. That is just a matter of doing it again better. But occasionally, you may find it just isn't possible to ski that combination of gates. At hat point you go back into planning mode and choose a different gate, and figure out how to ski the new combination as fast as possible.

 

[AG31]

Pantser is a writer who doesn't outline their ideas and doesn't really plan their story before writing it. Pantser just writes and lets the inspiration take them wherever it takes them. The opposite would be a writer who is a plotter. Plotters plan their stories, create an outline, detailed or not, but either way, they have a clear plan where they want to go with their story.
This is just a rough explanation. There are nuances to this, of course.

It may be rough, but it's extremely helpful! Thanks!

 

[AG31]

If you like, you can pick any story and I can say what was in my mind when I started it.

I'll definitely keep this in mind!

 

[AG31]

But I'm the kind of English nerd that thinks sentence diagramming is neat.

Me too! I loved it in grade school. In my "maturity(?)", however, I like to think about it but keep bumping into sentences that I wouldn't be able to diagram in a million years. It's possible that I've just lost the knack, but what I really think is that the English language is a bitch and I'm so glad I didn't have to learn it later in life!

 

[KeithD]

Pantsing can be based on an inherent experienced-based knowledge of how to construct a story. To be successful it has to be more inherently organized than just blundering about creating a possibly good 3,500-word story using 30,000 rambling words and flailing threads.

 

[Cagivagurl]

I don't think there's a right or wrong way to write...
What works for somebody won't work for others...

I never really considered giving it a name... But according to this thread I'm a pantser...
When I write, a lot of my stories start from nothing more than an overheard conversation, a news article, or something like that...
When I sit down to write it just starts evolving. No ending, no real plot...
Once I slip into a little dialogue the story starts to unfold. That may change 4 or 5 times during the writing process.
It always amazes me how it changes...
It's fun, so I don't care.
That is after all why I do it... FUN...

Writing music is different. There's set boundaries once you have a melody. You're trapped by it. The formula is cast...
Writing a story is completely different. It can go wherever you let it take you.
Good advice I was given... "Just enjoy it."

Cagivagurl

 

[KeithD]

I do often have an idea what the ending is before I begin to write. What I think, though, signals being a "pantser" writer is that this isn't always required before writing and can change as the story is being written or even right before it's posted. Even the beginning can be changed later if the author finds one to like more. What gives a "pantser" his/her little writing thrill is the writing journey.