On Plotting, Pantsing and Facing the Cold Page

Confessing: I’ve always been a pantser. I’ll need a narrative arc and some themes, a very strong sense of my central character/s, and of the world or worlds they move through, but I’ve never quite known quite how my characters will react until they’re faced with the relevant situation, and sometimes they can zig when I’d expected them to zag.

The end of Ecko Burning, where Rhan faces his brother, wasn’t supposed to happen ‘til the Big Ol’ Fantasy War at the end of the trilogy… but the characters took the decision out of my hands. They were going to fuck shit up, there was nothing I could do about it, and their epic showdown completely wrote itself.

To this day, it’s one of my favourite and most powerful scenes.

Replying on gut-reaction pantsing, however, makes hard plotting a difficult thing to navigate. When the characters are forced along the road from A to B, text can end up reading lank and clunky, because there’s no passion in it. You don’t care, and neither do they. Why should they? It ends up reading ‘and then they went, and then they went’, with no real human feeling or motivation, because everything’s trundling round a track.

Stephen King, in his On Writing, describes all this far better than I ever could. He creates the situation, he puts the characters in it, and he plays big game of ‘What If?’

Since Covid, however, my opinions have started to change.

In the before times, I had no time. I yakked up five hundred words a morning, before dashing out the house to work, meaning I had no space to piss about. When Covid hit, the dream came suddenly true: I could finally stay home and write. And, to my horror, it turned out to be utterly counterproductive.

I had too much time. I had time to doubt and undermine myself, to think, ‘Well, maybe the characters would do this thing and not that thing, that thing and not the other thing’. With no solid under-structure, I ended up second-guessing myself constantly, forever unpicking things and rewriting them, and driving myself right up the sodding wall.

All of this not helped by the evil brain-fog, which is something I’ll talk about another time.

These days, back at work and with my days and weeks now rather different, I’m settling to a new realisation: that the truth of the plotting/pantsing equation is somewhere in the middle (isn’t everything). As the brain-fog recedes (thank fuck!), I do need structure, certainly enough to drive forwards without tripping myself up and forever doubting where I’m going.

I love world-building (always have, must be the gamer in me), and equally love how, sometimes, that world can come into focus (almost fractal-style) the more the characters move through it, and I still absolutely believe that your characters need room to breathe and to think for themselves, otherwise they just trudge.

But, both professionally and personally speaking, when you’re facing that cold page, it’s really good to know where you’re going!

Reading: Randomly picked upNikki Marmery’s Lilith, knowing absolutely nothing about it. And it’s wonderful, lush and beautifully written, weaving its way flawlessly through Christian and Hebrew mythology, while taking an excellent side-swipe at the male-dominated Bible and how it was manipulated to keep women in their place.

Watching: Finally reaching the end of Red Dwarf, and watching the cast steadily age with a huge amount of both nostaglia and fondness. That, and get a steadily bigger budget!

Playing: Have finally completed the first stage of Baldur’s Gate, dragging my little party to fifth level. The githyanki’s got the horn, the high elf vampire keeps munching my neck, and Haslin the Druid is giving off an increasingly strong ‘Daddy’ vibe. I do have the baby owlbear, though, so everything’s okay.