I’ve always suspected I wasn’t quite a pantser, but neither am I a planner. I call myself a plantser. I like to have a roadmap, but I need it to be loose enough that it allows my characters to take over and lead the way, some of the time, anyway.
I explore this here. It’s the first article in the new iteration of The Experiment (my live, warts-and-all novel-writing project). In this brand new version I’m going to be sharing the book I’m working on, in its just-written, hot-off-the-press, unedited version. Here goes. Please be kind…
I accidentally started writing a new book yesterday.
Wait. That’s not entirely true. This is a book I’ve been thinking about for a while. A couple of years, in fact. I even wrote a draft. It was just a novella, fairly short, so it wasn’t that much of an undertaking. But I wasn’t entirely happy with the result, I knew it needed something else, I just didn’t quite know what. Since I wasn’t contracted to write this novella, and therefore didn’t have a deadline, and since no one even knew I was working on it, I decided to shelve it until I knew exactly what it was missing.
That happened a while ago. But I’ve been busy with other things (not the least of which has been Compendia), so I just made notes and pondered the book. The more I did, the more the idea mutated. And the more excited I got about it. I started really cutting back on what was already down on that first page, excising whole scenes, and then whole characters. Then the premise went, and the setting, and then I realised I was actually pondering a different book. The first had been a stepping stone, perhaps, but the novella I now wanted to write was radically, completely, different.
A few weeks ago I began collating all the notes I’d made, and then sat down to begin planning the book itself. I was determined not to start writing the draft until my plan was solid, however.
At the beginning of last week I told myself I wanted to plan to the mid-point by Sunday. I soared past that deadline and kept going, and yesterday found I’d planned the first four of the five acts of the book.
I realised something else, too. I’d planned as far as I could go. I coudn’t really work on the final act, not in any detail at least, until I’d drafted at least the first half of the book. So, since I was raring to go, and had had the first line in my head for about five months (“It’d been an uneventful flight, right up until the moment the crack appeared.”) I began to type.
It was exciting. The main character’s voice was in my head already. I can see him, I know how he thinks. I like him, mostly, and can already see how he’s going to change in the course of the book.
There were some surprises, though. I knew he had a child, but not that his wife was almost certainly going to leave him. That wasn’t in the plan (I’d thought she already had), but it is now. And it’s opened up some more avenues to explore.
That’s why, whether i like it or not, I’m a plantser. I need a roadmap, something to refer to so that I know I’m on track, so I couldn’t be a pantser. But I also need there to be room for the book to develop as it wants, for my characters to take over once they’ve started to acquire the flesh and organs and guts that writing gives to their skeletal outlines. The challenge of writing is to get these fictional people up and walking about, so having done so, doesn’t it make sense to give them a bit of a say in where they’re going?
So that’s why I plants. Half plan, half pants. And below, is what I came up with, the first draft of the first chapter of my novella. It doesn’t have a title, yet, though my document is called ‘Icelandic Horror’ so that might give you an idea of where it’s going… It’s for full subscribers only, as I’m sharing my work at such an early stage. But do consider upgrading, you’ll get all my posts, past and future, including essays, humour, fiction, behind-the-scenes publishing gossip, and much more, plus access to the regular writing group. All for as little as 65p (around US$0.83) per week.