He Who Controls the The Spice

I’ve written before about Plantsing, when you combine plotting and pantsing into a hybrid approach that uses the strengths of each style of plotting a novel. I think Plantsing actually underscores a deeper concept that often gets overlooked: There is no One Way.

There’s no One Way to do anything in writing, in fact. You can type on a keyboard or a typewriter, you can tap on a tablet or a phone, you can scratch with a pen or a pencil, you can dictate to a transcription App. You can plot, you can pants, you can plants. You can work up detailed character sketches or you can just wing their dialog and backstory. Base characters on real people or movie characters or no one at all.

In other words, sometimes this business of discussing writing and passing advice back and forth devolves into a search for the ?right’ way to do something, and there clearly isn’t such a thing. Which leads me to my next thought: Variety being the spice of life.

Try Something New

Some of my most energized, fun writing has been done after shifting gears and trying a new way of approaching my work, whether writing in a style or voice I’ve never tried before or working with new tools. It’s easy to get locked into ruts in this business, easy to just do what comes naturally. But that leads to stagnation, or simply a loss of energy. Something as simple as writing at a different time of day, or using a different implement, can recharge you and make it all seem new.

That’s what I chase, sometimes—that newness. When I was a kid, writing was this amazing thing where every day I’d read something new to steal in a book and rush to incorporate it into my stories. Every day I’d have new ideas that I’d never seen before (note, that doesn’t mean they were unique—just that I hadn’t seen them; the list of things I still haven’t seen is very, very long), and when I pulled off a successful story I was goddamn excited.

You lose that, little by little, as you polish and refine and age. My writing is much better today than it was 30 years ago, but that excitement has worn a little thin. Changing things up and chasing that spice is usually the cure.

Of course, another way to get that excitement back is to drink a fifth of Michter’s. It works, but the writing is largely incoherent.