I dislike flying. There’s an implied lack of control involved and it always makes me terrible nervous to do. Why I’m writing, it’s the same thing – I just can’t fly by the seat of my pants. I know authors who do this, have even met some who swear by it as the only way to write. It’s not for me, though. Instead, I plot. Meticulously, thoroughly, and without remorse. Heck, I even outline my short fiction, just to make certain it follows a logical progression of plot and theme.

There are some who say (and yeah, that’s a straw man – my blog, my logical fallacies) that they love the surprise of just writing and seeing what the characters will do next. If it works for you, then congratulations, but there’s no way I can do that. The amount of time I have available to write is precious, and I can’t afford to waste it on dead-ends and recursive moments that will get ripped out of the final draft. If my story’s going to surprise me, if it’s going to catch me off guard, it will do so during the outlining stage, because once I start writing, I like to know where I’m going.

This isn’t to say I am 100% married to the outline and never deviate – heck in my current Work-In-Progress I ended up rolling two characters together because it added depth to the character and meant I didn’t have to draft scenes creating this secondary character’s ties to the plot. I do stick to it enough, however, that I often write my closing scene first. Once I know where I’m going, I can set my goals towards getting there. In some cases I can even foreshadow language used in the end at the beginning to help bring a sense of closure to the piece.

Is there a middle ground? Certainly. Plontsing, or whatever the portmanteau would be, allows some freedom within the larger structure of the piece. I plonts more with short fiction than long, partly because it’s easier to fix, and partly because my outlines for short fiction tend to be more abstract that for long fiction – on especially short pieces, the outline may only be a few character sketches and a 5-6 line diagram of the basic plot.

In the future, I’ll talk more about my specific method, but this seemed like a good topic to lead into that. Much of how I write comes from the fact that I’m a plotter, rather than a pantser, so we needed to get this out of the way early. How about your? Plotter? Pantser? Or Plontser?