Confessions of a pantser

I’ve been a pantser most of my writing life. I mean a serious fly-by-the-seat-of-my-trackies-oh-god-where-is-this-thing-going-no-I-can’t-look pantser.

So much of what is rich and deep and striking comes out when I’ve tucked away my rational mind. It creeps up on me unannounced. It emerges like it always existed and was just waiting for me to find it. It is always so much better than anything I could have logically mapped out myself.

The result is it can take me a long time to find all the pieces of the puzzle and put them together in a coherent narrative. The resulting slowness of the process is something that over time I’d come to consider as a sort of necessary price to pay for the richness that exists in the aether. But I’ve always feared that it might stand in the way of a legitimate writing career.

So, it’s no small thing to realise that actually - PLOTTING WORKS. Plotting works… for ME.

I was coherent enough in January (after an outrageous 2020, lets be honest) to book myself into a writing course with the Australian Writers Centre. One of the early tasks was to present a synopsis outline of the story I’m writing. I set to work, got approximately half-way through and then stopped.

You see, I had pantsed my way to a solid Act and a half of the book. I’d arrived at what I felt was a fantastic mid-point. I’d even jotted down some solid ideas for Part 2. And I knew where I wanted it to end. But I couldn’t move any further. I got completely stuck.

For months before this I’d been dancing around it. I went back and rewrote the first half. I changed the entire Point of View of the book. I brainstormed and pottered. I’d chipped away. I’d edited. I just couldn’t move forward. I was scared of it, I think.

So then, there I am mere weeks away from having to produce a full synopsis, and four months from having to hand over a whole manuscript, and I just had to jump.

In drafting this synopsis - trusting the ideas that were there and fleshing them out, discovering what worked, finding the rhythm that felt right - I realised that I will never again embark on a second or third draft without a solid, coherent and tested synopsis to guide me. Landing it felt amazing, and also made me realise why past efforts didn’t quite work out.

So now I can have the best of both worlds.

I’ll always be a pantser at heart. It’s how my best ideas are born. And conveniently, allowing myself the freedom to just write - following a rough guideline but with the freedom to explore - is also how a first draft might be arrived at. Landing a tight synopsis after that, and using it as a space in which to nail the story before I embark on any major edit, is a gift I’ll not withhold from myself again.

None of this is rocket-science of course. More experienced writers would be wondering why it took me so long to figure this out. But it’s a joy to get a step closer to nailing my own process. And such a thrill to feel progress after so long in the trenches.