Agile Writing - Part 1: Pantsers vs. Plotters

Software development takes on the plotter vs. pantser divide.

There are two major schools of thought when it comes to writing a long piece like a novella or novel: plotting or pantsing.

With plotting, the writer first outlines the events of the story, plots it out, figures out what's going to happen at the beginning, middle and end. Maybe they adhere to a framework like the three-act structure to ensure they have a best-seller on their hands. The point is to build the story before the actual writing even starts. The writing then is just the finishing drywall, paint and decoration.

The second approach is to go in guns blazing (literally or figuratively, I mean in media res is a thing after all): no outline, no plot, no plan. The story goes where it wants, unconstrained by the shackles of a plot outline. To plotters, this is madness, dooming the work to a meandering path of failure and reader-confusion, fluff and cruft. This approach is called "pantsing," from the concept of "flying by the seat of one's pants."

The plotters and pantsers line up pretty closely with the Mac vs. PC ads that were popular (oh my God, has it been that long?) around 2006-2009. Plotters are straight-laced. Businesslike. Pantsers are free spirits, hipsters, the cool kids.

It might seem like the plotter must be the "real writer" position, the professional take on the matter. When someone in the publishing biz says, "We'd like to publish your work, but this is a business, Mr. Hoelscher. Can you be businesslike?" I can pull out my outline and say, "Certainly, ladies and gentlemen, check out my badass outline which reflects my stability and sobriety." Boom, a major publishing deal is struck, I humblebrag-post a Publisher's Marketplace screen cap and buy John McAfee's pleasure island in Belize with the royalties.

But it's not so cut-and-dried! Stephen King, in On Writing: A Memoir on the Craft, outs himself as an unrepentant pantser. And it's not an isolated thing where he makes a veiled allusion to "going where the story takes him" or some writerly bullshit; he describes his pantsic tendencies in an extended fossil-excavation metaphor (he's "discovering" the "fossils" that are the "buried story"—i.e., he's making it up as he goes along). And I know, I know, Stephen King again, plenty of writers complain that he's a hack. But he's a successful hack who claims he's only outlined and plotted two of his books in his long career. No matter your feelings about King, that's an impressive record of pantsing.

I recently started writing to an outline, just to get a feel for whether it made for a better writing process for me. I've always been a pantser, from back when I was writing more poetry and song lyrics than anything else (the natural thing is to just start writing verse rather than create a structure and then fill it in). The book I'm querying now was pantsered. The thing that changed my mind was the sheer amount of editing I had to do to get the pacing right and to get the emotional structure to feel like there was movement in the right places and stillness where calm was needed. I feel like that would have been more of a structural decision (rather than an intuitive one) if I had started with a structure to begin with.

I can't say yet whether I like it or not, and I have some trepidation about being a slave to the outline. But! But, I think I have an exit strategy that will allow me to bring together my plotting aspirations and my pantsing history and make for a beautiful alternative to both. It's based on my work in the tech industry where we use something called the "agile methodology" to structure how we do our work. I again warn that it might be a boring post, but I invite you to check out part 2 of this post. I'll link here when it's up.