Someday writers everywhere will gather in Central Park like in the beginning of The Warriors and a cult-like leader will strut about an ersatz stage demanding to know if we can dig it, and then everyone will form up into two armies: Pantsers and Plotters. The War of Literary Identity will be epic for about twelve hours and then everyone will realize they’re actually Plantsers and a new Pax Litterara will bloom.
Even though your personal approach to plotting is, you know, personal, there remains this sense among a lot of writers that there are rules to all this stuff, and that therefore there is a right way to Pants your way through a story. One school of thought is that if you’re a Pantser that means you don’t do any sort of planning whatsoever, that every novel is like an eighth-grade jazz ensemble—everyone just sort of playing something and then miraculously in hour two of the set everything comes together for ten wild minutes and a song is achieved. In other words, there has to be a lot of wasted time as you noodle about without any plan, until inspiration combined with luck results in a plot.
In my experience, this isn’t true.
No Stairway
The way Pantsing works for me is similar to working out a guitar part for a song. I’m no musical genius, and my knowledge of music theory isn’t broad. I play for my own pleasure, and I build my little songs using a pretty simple process: I start with a chord progression that sounds kind of interesting, then I start noodling with scales over that progression until something resembling a song emerges.
That’s pretty similar to how I write a novel: I start with something foundational, either a scene or a character or a premise, and then I noodle over that until something resembling a story emerges.
The key here is just that—the key. In my musical noodlings, I’m operating within the framework of a musical key, which dictates the notes that will sound good over the chords. It’s chaos and noodling, yes, but noodling within a framework. It’s the same for writing—yes, I’m throwing words around to see what sticks, but it’s within a framework. Pantsing is not, I don’t think, just starting with a blank page and then relying on automatic writing or something to come up with a plot. Unless it is, for you, in which case, you do you.
The framework is vital, for me. It can be so broad and flexible as to be nigh invisible and infinite, but it has to be there. Otherwise you’re that eighth-grade jazz ensemble. You might get lucky, but you can’t repeat a trick you didn’t understand in the first place.