If you’ve been in the writing world for any length of time, you’ll have heard the terms ‘Pantser’ and ‘Plotter’ thrown around. Maybe even the less-common intermediate descriptors of Plotser or Plantser.

In the event that these are new for you, a Pantser is someone who writes by the seat of their pants. They have an idea and run with it, without much knowledge of how the story will end. Some people also call them Discovery Writers. Plotters lay everything out before they start writing. Some of them even have spreadsheets, graphs and charts. They know their story’s midpoint, they know where the twists should happen, they may even have percentages mapped out. The other two terms are for people who fall somewhere in the middle.

If they were to guess, many of my friends might suspect that I’m a plotter. I do love my spreadsheets. I’m organized. I love charts and graphs. I love doing research and learning for the sake of it. Alas, I’m not a plotter in the least. I’m a pantser through and through.

There is always a magical moment for me when I’ve figured out how a story is going to end. Then all I have to do is get there. Until then, there’s kind of a thrilling fear every time I open the document. There’s something fun about not knowing where you’re going, but it is a little bit terrifying.

At one time in my career, I tried plotting on. I aspired to change, to live in plotter-dom.

It looked so organized. So professional. My friend who is a plotter showed me wipe boards with post it notes. She would move them around to decide which scene would go where. “How fantastic,” I thought. “She can just figure it all out before she makes a mess in a document.” And also how fun to have a wipe board with post it notes all over it. I wanted that.

The upper left corner of the plotted outline to *Ghost Tamer* that my friend did after reading it.

She threw one of my novels into a spreadsheet for me and showed me where my ‘tent poles’ were. Tent poles are the spikes in your novel where big things happen. And plotters know how to strategically place them. That spreadsheet was amazing. I used it to write my synopsis when I started submitting Ghost Tamer.

This is what I need to be doing, I thought. This is organized, professional, and ‘real.’

So I tried it. I bought the craft books that they recommended and read them. I tried to figure out tent poles. I tried to think of a book to plot.

It made me miserable. I didn’t want to write anymore. Nothing was satisfying. Inspiration was dead. When I went to my document, all I felt was dread.

One of the main advantages to plotting that I see is less time spent editing your work afterward. Less time spent fixing plot holes or cutting out characters that ended up being superfluous. You’ll have figured all of that out in advance.

In the end, it wasn’t worth it to me.

I decided that if it killed my love of writing, there was no point. Yes, I might have to edit more, but that part was fun too. Once I’ve actually figured out the damn story and know what I’m doing. It’s fun to flesh it all out. So I’ve embraced my pantserness.

“What about story structure?“ you ask. Or maybe you didn’t, but that was another one of my big concerns and one of the advantages to plotting that I saw. There is a way that we, as human people, have been trained to experience storytelling. There are certain ebbs and flows we’ve come to expect, and if we don’t experience them when we expect to, it’s jarring.

The fact of the matter is, even as we’re writing, we experience this. If you’re writing something and bored while doing it and think ‘wow, I really wish I could just be writing that next scene.’ Well, just go and write that next scene. Do you need the one you’re laboring over? Maybe you do, that happens too, but you’ll know, if so. We have experienced the storytelling patterns throughout our lives, so most of us unconsciously mimic them. So far, it hasn’t been a huge problem for me.

There are still things I like to write down and keep note of. And the more I write in one particular world, the more frequent that is. I still don’t consider myself a plotser really. The one thing I do try and do as soon as I can, is figure out my main character’s arc. I have two books that I wrote where I had to go and pull that out after the fact and two that I’ve written where I had the arc firmly in mind. So much easier to edit afterward if your character at least goes through their growth journey clearly throughout your book.

Right now, writing is fun enough that I do it on vacation. I want to keep that joy.

And maybe it would be easier if I had every scene laid out and knew what was coming next. A nice bird’s eye view before I even began. But it’s not fun for me. So, I watch the plotters with admiration, knowing I’ll likely never be one of them.

Because first and foremost, creating should be fun.

The Pantser/Plotter Wars ~ Is one better than the other?