Plotters and Pantsers

You may have heard of these approaches to writing novels: the plotter meticulously plans what happens and then fills it in. The pantser writes a scene and figures out what happens next.

Those are extremes, of course. I just finished the first draft of a book, and am afraid that however much I want to be a plotter, I keep winding up a pantser. I plan out what comes next, and then find when it comes down to the details of the moment, character X would logically do something completely different. I'm careful to foreshadow plot point Z, and it turns out not very important.

I tried an experiment this time: a "clothesline outline." Know what you want to start with--the people, setting, and problem. Know what you want to end with--the people, setting, resolution and finale. "Hang scenes on the clothesline" in between them. Then fill in the steps in between.

It helped. I still had a awful lot of "seat of the pants" stuff to try to keep corralled, though.

Next: go through with a checklist--Is the action still all in my head? Is the voice consistent? And make a "page timeline" so I can visually check the rising/falling action.

When I was in school we were all told, many many times, "Make your outline, and turn that in with your report." I always wrote the report first, and the outline second. A report's structure was too simple; it wasn't worth worrying about. If I had to turn the outline in first, I wrote the report early, wrote and turned in the outline, and turned the original report later. The problem was that writing the thing itself sometimes brought to mind details I'd forgotten but which changed the relative importance of parts of the essay.

Maybe if we'd been asked to stand at the board and scribble an outline on the fly...