How do they do it? You know who I’m talking about: “pantsers”. Those people who start writing a book and just keep going. It seems that every mega-successful author works in this style. By which I mean Lee Child. But also a huge load of authors I’ve been lucky enough to meet, or seen interviews with.
They describe it as driving at night with the headlamps on: you can see a little way in front of you, enough that you don’t crash, but the rest is darkness and you don’t know how far down the road you are, and you’ve probably got the radio on to stop yourself feeling scared and lonely (maybe I’m stretching the metaphor here). Anyway, why on earth would you do that?
I can’t think of a greater terror, as a writer, than getting halfway into a book, thousands of words, and finding that it’s rubbish, that it’s going nowhere, and that I have no idea what I’m doing. I have to write around my day job so it takes me about a year to produce a book. That would be months of wasted work. Horrifying.
I am a “plotter”. I write a four or five line paragraph for each three-thousand word chapter. Of course, the plan bears little resemblance to the final book. The order changes, the events change, sometimes the whole beginning and end change. So what’s the point? Let me present you with another metaphor, one that I find appropriate.
When you’re in the middle of writing, and you’re as far from the beginning as you are from the end you can experience a strange kind brain-fart where you feel completely lost. You don’t know where you’re going, you can’t even see where you’ve been. It’s like being lost in a blizzard. You can’t even tell up from down anymore.
And that’s where your plan comes in. Your plan is like a rope line through that blizzard, you know it leads in the right direction, all you have to do is get one hand over the other, one foot in front of the other, and you’ll find your way, and when the storm clears you’ll find you’re much closer than you thought.
So pants if you’re willing to pants, but don’t think it’s the secret to writing wonderfully. Pansters always say crap like “if I don’t know what’s going to happen then neither does my reader” which can just as easily be applied to planning a book, and can also be re-translated as “if I don’t know where the hell my book is going neither does my reader” and that ain’t good. Planning is the surest way to avoid disappointment, both yours and your reader’s. And if you’re one of those authors who can pants because you’re churning out a book a year on an endless contract then you can do what you want because you’re probably raking it in, and don’t come moaning to me, some of us have to work for a living.
An earlier version of this article appeared on Bound2Escape
