During the hiatus, I got this interesting email:
“I’m one of those pantsers whose stories get set in concrete the minute they’re written. Oh, I can change the wordings a bit, or move a sentence here or there, but the story is set in my mind. I can rip out whole chunks of it, and when I rewrite them, they come back the same, but with different words. I’m wondering whether you, or someone you know of, has any advice on how to handle that?”
This is interesting largely because I am not a pantser. I’ve written that way a couple of times, but it is far from my preferred working mode … and in fact the majority of things I’ve tried to write that way haven’t worked. So I’m not exactly an expert on this process.
However, not being an expert has never stopped me from having an opinion before; I see no reason why it should stop me now.
My first reaction was, what makes this writer so sure he is a pantser? Process is a continuum, and there are very, very few writers in my experience who do no planning up front. Even the ones who brag about sitting down in front of a blank page have almost always done some thinking about what they are going to write, whether it’s a mental picture of the character they want to set into motion, the idea of a musician hunting for a spy, or the vague notion that the first scene takes place in the basement of a museum.
Also, I’ve met rather a lot of people who say they are pantsers, when what they are is impatient. They find the planning stage boring; they want to get straight to writing the story. Or they’re sure they will hate the planning part, so they skip it without ever trying. It’s not that they can’t plan; it’s that they choose not to. In that instance, my advice would be to try it. It may be one of the not-fun bits of the job I talked about last week.
However, let’s assume this writer has tried planning things out in advance, and discovered that it makes writing the story harder-to-impossible, rather than helping it run smoothly. In this case, my first piece of advice would be to slow down.
Pantsers, in my experience, tend to write rapidly during a session, trying to get all their ideas down on the page before they escape. This leads to grabbing the first thing on the top of one’s mind as the next sentence, bit of dialog, or event … and unless one’s brain is wired completely differently from everyone else’s (which is sometimes true), the very first idea that presents itself for “what comes next” is something that has cropped up a million times in this sort of situation, even if it isn’t quite a cliché.
Most of the pantsers I know fix this kind of thing in the rewrite. When one’s prose rapidly sets up into concrete, though, this becomes difficult, if not impossible. The sentence “He walked slowly into the room” looks completely wrong whether the writer tries to make it “Slowly, he walked into the room” or “He crept into the kitchen.”
For another group of writers, “what happens” is the part that locks up. They can write “He walked slowly into the room” or “He crept into the kitchen” without any problem, but they can’t have the character run in, or be distracted just outside the door by a phone call. And ninjas certainly can’t leap through the window, because they didn’t do that the first time. What happened is what happened.
Either way, the faster things lock up, the more important it becomes to get it right the first time. If you can’t fix it after it has been written, you have to fix it either before you write it – by planning – or while you write it, by slowing down enough to consider whether there’s a better alternative. If it’s too hard to do this in a “live” session, one could try exercises to attempt to train one’s brain to do it right the first time.
Those are the options: You can fix things before, during, or after writing the scene. Before means planning ahead; during means slowing down; after means learning to edit after. There aren’t any other choices.
In addition to slowing down and trying writing exercises, I’d recommend trying to edit someone else’s lousy scene(s). Pick a published story you think is horrible, and try to fix it. Since you have no personal investment in the story, it ought to be easier to change, which will train you to see alternatives (which is what revising and editing are all about). Swapping rewrites with a friend can work, and can even be more helpful, but it can also wreck the friendship if one or both of you can’t handle that kind of criticism, so be careful if you try doing it that way.
The other thing I’d suggest is that before you start trying to edit a scene, you take a long, hard look at the scene and figure out exactly why you aren’t happy with it the way it is. Perhaps the problem isn’t with this scene; it’s actually with the setup for it that happened three scenes back. Or perhaps the problem is not so much “what happens isn’t the right thing” as “the main character is not reacting in a way consistent with his/her portrayal up to now.” When I try to fix the wrong thing, my backbrain rebels. Quite often, when I am trying to fix the wrong thing, it’s because fixing the right thing would be more work than I want to do. Fixing the wrong thing never helps, except insofar as it makes a bigger and bigger mess of things until the only option left is the one I really didn’t want to have to deal with. It’s much faster to just do the hard thing in the first place.
Ooh, what a good question! Though I promptly fell into the “brain wired completely differently” category. 😉
I can’t speak for the questioner, but I do write extremely slowly, and I like to think I get most of it right the first time. But there are still occasions when some revision must be done. If it’s something that was in my head but didn’t make it to the page, that’s usually not too bad, but if it’s something new I have to put in… it’s machete-and-det-cord time. It’s miserable, and I fight it like mad, and while I accept that the hard parts are necessary, I’d love to find a way to make it a little less hard.
(In defense of the questioner’s self-description: I also call myself a pantser if I have to give a one-word answer, but I’m really a “I usually have a starting scenario, and an idea of the kind of ending I want, and maybe a specific scene or two, and then I toodle along with whatever my back-brain spews out for a half-a-dozen chapters, and then I frequently stop and outline one chapter, and then I toodle along a bit more, and there’s usually some brainstorming and maybe strong language, and then I might list some points I need to be sure I hit, and then more toodling, and then the ending may or may not have fallen out of my fingers some time previously….” Yeah, let’s just say pantser, and save everybody some time.)
Thank you for this post, and my thanks to whoever asked this question! (Because I’m a fairly-near-to-making-most-scenes-up-as-I-type writer, and my dialogue has started to annoyingly quickset itself, except where it’s obviously wrong. It’s especially painful when I suspect I don’t have the person’s voice down exactly right, but I can’t catch what the problem is at that moment and therefore can’t replace the slightly off line with a clearly better one.)
I’ve also found that writing extremely slowly and giving myself time to consider alternative lines can help. My other trick, for whatever it’s worth, is to put asterisks next to sentences or words that I’m not sure about. They’re extremely easy to find with a search-and-replace function if one doesn’t include random asterisks in one’s normal prose, and they somehow fool me into thinking of the sentence/word as not entirely approved yet.
(My only “planned” scenes are the scenes that I imagine accidentally, fall in love with, and then try to figure out how to write to, which sometimes works and often doesn’t. For anyone who operates that way, my less-pleasant-but-sort-of-effective trick is to give myself a few weeks of involuntary break time – also known as “grading thirty lab reports and some midterms” – and inadvertently imagine ridiculously more options for a scene’s contents than the scene could possibly hold. That forces me to admit that, no, this character didn’t ask the same question three different times in three different ways because the author thought of three phrasings that sounded sort of cool; she actually wouldn’t ask that question aloud, because she’s semi-polite and fairly reserved, and the author should stop trying to put the wrong words in her mouth. Then I get to ditch almost all of what I’ve imagined…which is difficult and unpleasant, and why I’ve rewritten the same first-draft page about five times in the past week, but I think that’s the only way I’m going to get the characters’ behavior right in this scene.)
About pantsing – I did once start writing a short novel with only the characters’ species in mind beforehand (and no other knowledge of specific characters until they appeared on the page); I wrote it extremely rapidly (about 40,000 of the ~51,000 words within five days, I think – NaNoWriMo!); and, either because my Cretaceous theropods are less implausible than my human characters, or because I only had time and mental space to develop two co-plots, that piece seems to be more popular with my beta readers than any of the more human-centric stories I’ve written. In general, if I write *extremely* rapidly (over 1,000 words per hour), the characters say and do lots of surprising and strongly in-character stuff, probably because my mental filters can’t keep up. But the interesting, startling lines are usually buried in multi-page sections of grammatically questionable scenery description, so I can’t recommend that to anyone whose entire book lithifies after the first draft.
I do the asterisk thing too!
I don’t use asterisks, I use Greek letters. This is because my first drafts look like thirty-thousand-word outlines, skeletons, like trees in winter, and I have to go back bit by bit and put the leaves in. (Not counting when I suddenly realize there’s a whole ‘nother branch that ought to go over *there*, that I hadn’t noticed till now.)
Sometimes I put the extra stuff directly into the computer file, other times I’m sitting around somewhere with a printout — which has margins, okay, but not enough to hold four paragraphs of expansion. So I put an alpha where they ought to go, and another alpha on the back of the previous page, and write the paragraphs, and then eventually put them into the file. And now and then I’ll print out a new copy of the chapter, and then shred the old one.
Repeat and repeat; I seldom get past beta or gamma on a given page.
My other trick, for whatever it’s worth, is to put asterisks next to sentences or words that I’m not sure about.
I do that with square brackets — or as I call them, find-a-better-word brackets. And yes, it does somehow magically keep the word(s) somewhat fluid and relatively easy to change when I finally figure out what should’ve been there in the first place. And also keeps me from losing the rest of the day in the thesaurus. 😉
I can work either way, but classify myself as a pantser because I am:
a) both lazy and impatient
b) it hasn’t gotten me into trouble yet
c) I find it easier to find interesting/in-character options if I’m in the moment/area/carrying baggage with my characters.
For myself, when the plot starts to set up before I want it to, I start writing ‘choose your own adventure’ bits for my betas (which they usually never see)
I’m a midpoint sort who is still trying to figure out how much planning is best for me. Also, unless the story is very short, I have to stop in the middle of writing and do (more) planning – planning that I just can’t do beforehand.
What sets up in concrete for me are Names. I can’t use placeholder names, or an IOU note promising to determine a name later. Once I know I need a character (or a place, or a thing) then I must have a name at once, before any further progress is possible. And once the name is set it cannot be changed.
One story was based on a prompt of “A character in an office has been getting a cookie from a secret admirer every day for the past week. But this time, the cookie comes with a note.”
That immediately launched me into “OK, I need a name for the character. OK now I need a name for the secret admirer. OK now I need a name for the business. OK, now I need a name for the bossman/owner of the business. OK, now I need a name for the character’s brother, that she is currently living with. OK, now I need a name for…”
Oh, that sounds familiar! I need Names too. And the Name has to feel appropriate for the character.
That’s one reason I ignore the popular advice to turn off Internet connections while writing. I do not get sucked into Facebook or Pinterest. But I do, quite frequently, need to name a character on the fly… and I find it quite helpful to be able to ask for, say, “Turkish boy names that were popular in 1992.”
Ouch. That’s more severe than my names issue – I can usually get away with initials for a while, although once someone does have a name, their personality welds to it, and I can’t change it without the horrible sense that I’m overwriting the character (or at least mutilating them).
Then beta readers say, “I have no idea how to pronounce this,” or “Too many people’s names start with the same letter,” or “I keep getting this character’s gender wrong, you should make their name sound harder/softer or end with an -o/end with an -a like I expect!” To which all I can say is, “…I’m sorry, the spelling got stuck that way, any pronunciation is fine,” or “But those are their names now!” or “So? And, no.”
It sounds like I don’t have that “personality welds to the name” problem, or at least not to the same extent. Once I have a name, I can imagine/invent/discover all sorts of other things about the character, but those other things do have some flexibility about them. Not unlimited flexibility, but some.
I do keep an eye on which initial letters I’ve already used for names, to avoid the “too many names start with the same letter” problem. (“OK, I need a female name. Let’s see, I haven’t used one that starts with ‘K’ yet…”) I also pay attention to making names ‘sound’ male or female as appropriate, even if it’s a foreign or non-human naming system that uses different conventions. Because those things do bother me as a reader, much like they bother your beta readers.
I’m a sort of semi-pantser. I start off with the main characters and a general concept for the story, plus a few scenes from somewhere in the middle, but I can’t really outline what happens in between, because that usually shapes itself as I write.
I don’t think of my text as set in concrete as it is holographic, wherein a single change anywhere resonates through the entire manuscript; therefore, to make any change, however minor, requires keeping the whole of it suspended in midair where I can see it all at once—and that is, frankly, impossible.
To address or incorporate another thread in these comments, changing a character’s name would require rewriting practically *everything* because each sentence was crafted and each word was chosen based on the other words around it. (I can get away with it if the change is really minor, like Grissom to Gresham; but changing Melita to Melina is a *big* change. [Don’t ask me why; I don’t know.])
One trick to dodge name-blocks stopping the flow of sentences dead is to make up/brainstorm name lists prior to or early on in the writing, to be set aside till called for. This is most useful when the names are not our-world, but works for our-world ones as well, especially if one is positing a particular ethnicity or location. Then when new minor character/town/river/whatever pops up, run one’s eye down the list till it lights on a name that seems to fit, plug in, soldier on. (Iirc it was Pat who gave me that tip originally.)
Placeholder symbols, which I also sometimes use, need fixed pretty soon, but I can do that after the high-flow writing session is over for the day. Once in a while I find I’ve wasted a desirable name on a lesser character or location, and end up swapping names around, but that needs to happen early on or it makes me itch like hives.
I’ve stumbled onto the “make up a list of extra names early on” trick on my own, mostly for not-our-world names. For 20th century American names, I have a Great Big List of names from the Census Bureau, along with a game-mastering random-table program to create a quick list of half a dozen or so names from the list when needed.
This works for suddenly-encountered secondary or minor characters. But for the major characters, settling on Names is something I do very early on, when the story (and the characters) are still cloud-like puffs of concept.
Thinking of those 20th century American names and the Census Bureau, https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/index.html will let you search the most popular registered names for any year from 1879 onwards. So your story’s set in 1990 and your character is 25? Put in 1965, and get a top 20 male and female names list.
Story titles aren’t as bad for me as character names or thing- or place-names within the story. I can’t use a placeholder title that I know I’ll change, but I can change a title if the story changes or I come up with a better idea.
I can also tolerate a “Title to be Determined,” but that’s annoying. It doesn’t help that coming up with story titles seems to be one of my weaker points.
Except when I’m pulling the rare and occasional Harlan Ellison, I generally cannot title a piece until I’m done with it. Working titles get in the way of my brain, so I usually just name the files after the main character (which I guess is a working title of sorts).