NaNoWriMo - Days Eleven and Twelve: I couldn't be a Pantser, could I?

Yesterday was just as busy as I thought it might be, and my flare was no better, either, so I fell asleep after 558 words and no blog entry! I'm not complaining though, because a) I'm so glad I got to go to the Christmas Show with my daughters and my friends, and b) I finally toughed through the worst of the flare, and today I'm much better in a lot of ways, despite having a migraine for the first 12 hours or so. If you'd told me a few years ago that I'd be happy to have a day with "only" a migraine, I'd have thought you were crazy! Isn't life funny? Everything's relative, I guess.

Anyway, to prove that today was better, here I am at 9:14pm, and I've already completed 1934 words today, for a grand total of 16,286. That's 32% of the total, so I'm very close to 1/3 done with the 50,000 word goal.

But enough with the statistics - On to the main topic of this blog post. Maybe you are still wondering what the term "pantser" means? I have to say, it's certainly not something I ever thought I would be. In fact, there was probably a time when I would have said pantsers were foolish and asking for trouble. I would have said it, that is, if I had known what it was! Then NaNoWriMo came and turned everything on its head. Not only did I discover the phrase pantser, AND learn what it meant, but I also came across some strong evidence that I might BE a pantser. Wow.

Okay, okay, before I force you to resort to a Google search out of frustration, I'll get to the point. It seems that most people are either plotters or pantsers. That is, they either outline their writing ahead of time, or they show up at the computer each day and fly by the seat of their pants. Guess which one I am? Oh, yeah, anyone who knows me would be probably say I'm a plotter. Heck, I would say I'm a plotter. Ever since English 101, I've loved outlines. They are awesome! You just organize your thoughts, jot key points in order, jiggle them around a little, and then your hard work is done. From there on out, you can just systematically turn each point into prose and you are golden.

Of course, I've done a lot more non-fiction writing than fiction . . . Still, I would never approach a novel without knowing what it was about. Or would I?

Going into this NaNo project, I had an idea for a story about three weeks before the official start. For NaNo purposes, you are allowed to do all the outlining and organizing you want before the start of November, as long as you don't start the actual writing of the book itself. So I spent the three weeks brainstorming, thinking through storylines, working out plot points, and I didn't have enough time to get it all completed. I had a good idea of where I was going and how, but not nearly to the point of a scene by scene outline. That had me a little nervous, but I didn't have much choice about it.

So, on November 1, 2010, I booted up my laptop, pulled up my barebones outline, and promptly changed the entire audience of my novel before I'd finished the first sentence. My plot and outline were for a children's book. I was writing a children's book, I tell you. But when I started writing that first sentence, I found out that I didn't think I could make this a children's book. The character wanted to be older. So right now, she's older. And so far I've just shown up at the computer every day to see what will come out.

Now, despite how much I like plotting and planning with non-fiction writing, I really shouldn't be surprised by how this has turned out. An honest appraisal of my character would have turned it up in a heartbeat. Fact is, I'm obsessed with planning. I love to research, I love to organize and make plans and set things up. But when it comes time to follow through? Man, I chafe at being held to a schedule. I'm like this in homeschooling too. Every summer I spend weeks researching and ordering and making up schedules. By Christmas, we're lucky if we are still using half of what I planned. The rest has been switched, dropped, or tweaked beyond recognition.

I've decided that's because creativity calls for flexibility. The more creative the endeavor, the more necessity there is for the whims of the muse or the needs of the moment. It is hard to predict the future with creative projects, and that's what planning tries to do.

That said, I still love planning, and I do think there is a place for it, a big place, in my creative "stuff". For example, the more research and planning I do, the more I learn. For me, planning is the place to start, whether it is for homeschool lesson plans or (apparently) a NaNo project. The ideas get to germinate, take root, get ready to sprout up. And then we get to find out what kind of plant they really are. Maybe we thought we were planting radishes, and it was really carrots. Who knew?

It looks like the novel I'm writing now was, in fact carrots, not radishes. So I'm using the basic plot ideas, but changing huge parts of the story, and mainly showing up to see what happens next. Hey, I'm in good company - apparently both Stephen King and Nora Roberts are known pantsers. They do pretty well for themselves.

The worst thing about pantsing is that a lot of what I write might end up needing to be changed. It might be really bad, even need to be deleted outright. But, as I've said before, I don't mind revising at all, so that's probably not such a bad thing for me.

The best part about pantsing is that I get to be just as interested and surprised as the reader. Doesn't that sound like fun?