Pantsing a story?
I heard a writer talking about pantsing a story. What does that mean?
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There are a couple of meanings for "pantsing" in writing. One is the saying that in order to write one must begin by applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.
But by far the most common meaning is "writing by the seat of your pants," by which is meant, writing without a predetermined plan. Some writers don't start actually writing until they have outlined the plot and created detailed descriptions of all of the characters. They are referred to as "plotters" or "planners". Others just start writing with no predetermined idea of the plot of the characters and see where the story takes them. They are referred to as "pantsers", meaning that they create their story by the seat of their pants.
But these two extremes are probably misleading. Writers probably exist more on a spectrum of how much preparation they do in advance vs. how much they wing it. Some, for instance, may have a rough back of the envelope idea of the story before they begin. Other's may start out exploring a vague idea and then, once they feel it is going somewhere, stop and plan out the rest of the story. (That is how I work most of the time.)
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I am a "pantser", or as we PREFER to be called, a Discovery Writer. So is Stephen King.
I typically begin a story without knowing the ending, or the plot, or all of the characters.
What I do have is a very strong idea of a main character, that my story will be about. She is usually female, and I always write in third-person-limited; so the reader knows her thoughts (at least every important thought, I don't conceal anything she knows to spring as a surprise later).
Thus far I have not written magic; but she will have some "superpower", not magical but she will be extremely good at that, and she will have some superflaw, something she is decidedly NOT good at it.
Then she will be presented with a problem that gives her very few opportunities to use her superpower, and demands instead the one skill she really sucks at.
That is what I know when I begin writing. I also know the structure of a story, by percentages; broken down into parts of about 5% or 10%. I have gone into that elsewhere; but what it means is that I know by the word count or page number what kind of scenes I am looking to write, based on how far into the book I am. Character building scenes, complications, resolutions, etc.
I also start with some vague idea of how the central problem could be solved, but that changes several times during the course of the book. Every ending I have written actually came to me about halfway through the book, when I am trying to devise the lowest point for my hero.
In the end, it is usually that she had to become competent in the skill she sucked at, and use it successfully to open the door to using her superpower to finally solve the main dilemma.
As Stephen King says in his book On Writing, every story has to come out somewhere, as long as you don't let your characters stall out.
We call it "Discovery Writing" because we find the story as we go. It can involve a great deal of rewriting, deletions, and realizing things like "Oh, that's what this story is really about!".
The reason I am a Discovery writer is because I tried, at least three times, to plot out a story like I had read we should do, and I came up with one, but then writing to an outline wasn't fun, it just felt like work and my characters felt wooden and forced. I didn't like it, and the spark of inventing the story was gone. I never finished any of those stories. The first time I read about discovery writing, and tried it, is the first time I completed a whole story of 100,000 words. I have never looked back.
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