Saturday, September 3, 2011

Pantser or Plotter?

A pantser is someone who can write without knowing or planning what is coming next. Expression comes from seat-of-your-pants writing.
A plotter is someone who creates a plan and an outline for their story.

Which one are you guys?

I flux a little between both.
Before 2010, I was a director that told my dolls what to do and to be like other things.
That and a lack of experience probably attributed to my former bad quality.

When I started to write The Space Cadet, my spin on ~Trancekuja2k's fic, I was exhilarated and having a need to please
Note emphasis on exhilarated and need to please:
This boost of assumed quality, along with writing for someone else instead of myself and a cloud forced me to buckle down and work on getting things right.

Up to that point, Space Cadet was one of my more polished pieces, and it was barely mine.
I am proud of it to this day, and that feels good.

I took the same techniques that I jury rigged in Space Cadet, and used them in my NaNoWriMo Pink Lemon Meta Corps story.
I fine tuned my techniques, and that's where the plotter and panster thing comes in.
I have said otherwise before, but I was still processing and experimenting with it at the time, but what I did was make the roughest outline that I could that did not sacrifice coherency. "A fight scene happens here." "Scene transition to evil lair where they discover that their plan is blowing up in their face" It's a bit more specific, but that's a good jist. I then take all the sparse notes for that scene, lay them out under Word, and use them as a guide as the characters do their thing. Unless I had something specific in mind, they just run off and play by the rules in the directional sentences I wrote beforehand. (the only rule is to not be uninteresting and not to stray into a total other story).

That's it. Stories are given the back-of-a-VHS-box treatment and then I go from there.
I just need to work on procrastination now.

How do you guys write your stories?

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