Welcome to Write Wrong. A podcast that talks about writing from the point of view of someone who’s been doing it wrong for far too long. I’m Cortney Hamilton, and this is Episode 004. Today I’ll be talking about: 

 

First Drafts. Pantser vs. Plotter: Deathmatch!! 

 

But first, a practical tip: if you get nothing out of this episode you get this: 

If you want a cheap popsicle, take an ice cube tray and fill it with orange juice. Put saran wrap over the top and poke a toothpick in the middle of each cube. Freeze and enjoy. 

If you don’t have a spare ice cube tray, use a shot glass, because let’s face it, if you’re at home drinking whiskey, you’re drinking from the bottle. 

 

 

Moving on:

 

Ah, yes, finishing a first draft: The both marvelous and despairing feat that, for me, feels not unlike being Tom Hanks in Castaway. Yes, I’ve made fire, but I’m still stranded on an island, sucking coconuts, and arguing with a volleyball garnished with my own blood.  

But finishing a first draft is still a prodigious achievement. And if you’ve done it, that’s awesome, and you should celebrate. If you’re on your way to doing it, let me give you this profound and sage advice I once received from an ex-girlfriend during an intimate coupling: Keep going. What’re you doing? Don’t stop. Keep going, Hamilton, you’re so. Freakin.’ Close! 

 

But it can be a challenge to finish a first draft. Writers can get caught up in judgment, early revision, showing it to people too soon, doubt, second-guessing, loud roommates, wailing children, cats on the keyboard, dogs licking themselves, that 18th-century ghost who lives in the closet and likes the light on, phone calls, texts, tweets, email, research, research, research, and don’t get me started on Tiger King. I’ve held out this long. I’m not watching Tiger King. I’m not watching Tiger King. I’m not--okay, just one episode so I can see how stupid it is and great now I’ve just binge-watched all seven episodes, and I need a shower.  

 

The list literally goes on and on. 

 

And there are a few ways to go about a first draft, and each will speak to different people. 

 

But first I want to talk about the whole pantser vs. plotter dichotomy. If you haven’t guessed, I hate both of these words immensely. Saying them makes me feel like I just got punched in the mouth by a five-year-old, hard enough to swell up my lip, but soft enough that I have to act like it didn’t really piss me off. 

 

Each approach has its merits, but often I see people identify themselves as either/or. And I’d like to talk about identifying with them too much, especially if you’re new to writing because it can be limiting if not downright annoying, kind of like your boyfriend, who, when you ask him to wipe the toilet after he pees, refuses and says, “Sorry, I’m a guy. That’s just the way I do it.” 

“It doesn’t have to be, Reece. Have some consideration for the love your life, you filthy pig.” 

 

And the risk of identifying yourself as either a pantser or plotter, as THE way your write, could undermine your potential. 

 

Just to define them quickly for those who are new to the terms. A ‘pantser’ is someone who plunges into their story without outlining. They have an idea in their head, maybe a couple of characters, but they don’t know the ending, or the middle, or quite possibly the beginning. They’re just going to find out what the story is as they write. Let the characters tell them. The term comes affectionately from the idiom’ fly by the seat of your pants’ from aviators who didn’t or couldn’t use their navigational instruments. This was made famous by Douglas’ wrong way’ Corrigan, who, planning a flight from New York to Long Beach, California, wound up in Dublin, Ireland. 

 

Douglas was a pantser. And maybe the place he got to ended up being better than where he wanted to go, but it’s doubtful he packed appropriately for it. 

 

Now, plotters are writers who write an outline, maybe do character histories, likely know the bare bones of what happens in each chapter, and then set down to write the story. When I picture a plotter, I get an image of an accountant clicking on a calculator for some reason. But that’s neither here nor there. 

 

You might identify as a pantser. You might identify as a plotter. But I’m going to propose that you’re probably both, which I have termed: plantser. A term that sounds like a nickname for someone who has sex with a ficus.

It’s also a word I have both copyrighted and refuse to say ever again as soon as I’m finished with this episode.

 

Because, really, we’re all plantsers. A plantser is just a pantser times time. And it’s a plotter minus time but only if you carry the two and subtract the impulse to dive in before you know what you’re writing. 

 

 I’ve been both a pantser and a plotter exclusively. Early on, as a new writer, I just wrote wherever the scenes took me, and I got a first draft done. Yay, me. 

 

The problem was that the work I needed to do after I’d finished that draft essentially put me squarely in the plotter stage. And I discovered that a lot of the writing that I’d already done had to be redone at a very fundamental plot/character level in order for the story to make sense and flow. 

 

And, as a pantser, I also found that sitting down each day to write was more of a challenge because I didn’t know what I was going to write next, and that took up a large part of my writing capacity for that day because you could write anything.

 

It’s paralyzing. I mean, sure, I’m writing a dystopian fantasy set on a planet made of glitter, but does my character go to the unicorn lair and confront his nemesis Snarkles to regain, yes, his powers, but more importantly his self-respect, or does he brave the harrowing maze of pointy-hats in the realm of gnomes where his magical toe ring is locked away by a sinister caterpillar who parasitically feeds off gnome brains turning them into an unholy army of shin-kickers. 

 

And maybe he goes to both. But which one, first? And why this one and not that one, first? And are the gnomes and unicorns in cahoots? And does our protagonist even know that yet? And what about the faeries? Won’t somebody think of the faeries?! 

 

My point being, by plotting out these ideas ahead of time, I’m able to focus the direction I want to go before I’ve invested hours into writing it.  

 

Now, I must admit, I did a lot of pantsing early on in my writing life, and I didn’t have a sense of what a satisfying story looked like. And so I definitely found myself floundering. And there are many new but far savvier writers out there who are better-schooled than I was in knowing what a good story needs. They know structure, character arc, plot points, and how to let the story unfold as they write it. 

And look, there are also some best-selling authors who identify as pantsers. And, let’s face it, school drills the idea that an outline is the path to boring. I mean, it uses Roman numerals, for God’s sake, the only numbers in the Olympics that do the opposite of telling me how many Olympics there actually have been. 

 

And pantsing can be helpful because you might need the characters to speak to you before you can get into the story, and the only way to do that is to just dive in. And if I’m well-versed in how a story needs to unfold to be captivating, then maybe diving in is great for me. 

But, if you are a pantser and you’re struggling to write that day, it could be time to step back and do a little plotting instead. 

 

And plotting doesn’t require roman numerals. I don’t have to use a traditional outline at all. I can do a simple character sketch, brainstorm my ending, or my three acts (or four or five) or my plot points. 

Maybe I’ve written a few chapters, but I know it’s not the beginning of the novel. I can come up with my inciting incident: The thing that happens to my character that sets the whole plot in motion. For example, in my dystopian fantasy, the inciting incident happens when Snarkles steals my protagonist’s girlfriend, kidnaps his pug, and gives his mother a swirly in front of the whole village. That’s it. I could start writing with that. 

 

And the great thing with plantsing, is that I plot and pants simultaneously. Well, not simultaneously, But I don’t have to figure out the whole story before I start writing.  

 

And it helps because it’s a plan. Furthermore, it’s a plan that I’ve thought about but not invested a ton of time in, and one I could happily change, if, after I start writing, I want, say, Snarkles to lose his horn and gain humility, because, after all, unicorns are just horny horses filled with a false sense of superiority to compensate for their dejection over never being cast in westerns. And if they’d just let their guard down a little, maybe we could see behind all the glitter and be more understanding and accept them for themselves for once.  

 

What I’m trying to say is, even a little planning can direct you toward a path that allows you to write faster because it’s easy to write yourself into a corner when you’re pantsing even if you hate corners. You might spend days on a chapter that you end up scrapping because you’ve changed the direction of the story. And, yes, this can happen with plotting too. But, if you can get a sense of the story before you start, there’s less of a chance. 

 

And it doesn’t have to be much. It could just be your beginning and ending. For me, after I’ve come up with my breakthrough idea of unicorns and gnomes, I try to know my ending. Because, if I know that then I have two points which allow me to chart the direction my character is going. It’s like being lost in the desert. If I don’t know the oasis is southeast, then it becomes desperately apparent that I’ll be walking in the wrong direction and that much closer to drinking my own urine. “C’mon, Reese, you got it all over the water bottle!”

 

And sometimes, I do start, and I don’t know my ending. I don’t know what happens in every chapter or act. Sometimes, I don’t know what happens in every sentence. I don’t even know my character that well. And I’ll write a little, I ‘pants,’ if you will until I have more of an idea of the story. 

 

Then I go back and plot a bit more. Back and forth. Back and forth. Hey, look at me, I’m plantsing. Said no one ever. 

 

 

Another good plantsing action is to flesh out the other supporting characters. Who else does my protagonist need on his journey? How can they help and/or hurt him? What are their relationships to each other? Again, I don’t have to know all the details, but even if I sketch out the broad strokes, it will help me to sit down and write a scene between the two. 

 

And look, I get it, there are people out there who are hard-core pantsers. They can’t write if they don’t pants. It works for them. And you have to find your own way. But I think that if you’re a new writer, in particular, plotting out your ideas can help you when it comes to rewriting. Because nearly everyone you know knows someone who knows, that rewriting your writing is actually writing. 

 

And rewriting can be a pain in the butt. Because, after I’ve fixed all the disconnections and made everything work on the page, I’m rereading my work for flowing prose, I’m cutting out all the repeated words, I’m making sure my chapters roll into one another, I’m looking for continuity, I’m fixing my punctuation and spelling, not to mention my dangling participles. And if you’re a new writer and you’ve pantsed your way through it, you might find yourself doing a lot more revision than if you just did a little plotting ahead of time. 

 

So I’ve said plantsing enough to make myself ill, and I apologize to your ears, so I’m moving on.

 

Here are a few other things I do to help me finish my first draft: 

 

1. Don’t think about your audience.  

 

I Don’t think about my audience. But I do think about style and voice. And if I know I’m writing in a specific genre: thriller, mystery, romance, then it’s good to know the published books out there and what has sold recently to get an idea of where my book might fit into the market. But, ultimately, I’m writing for myself first and foremost, and the style I choose has to be authentic and personal to me. 

 

And a first draft is a nice place to experiment with style. I might choose first-person or third or even the dreaded second. Will my mystery be more like Sherlock Holmes or Agatha Christie? Will my thriller be more Tom Clancy or Dan Brown? Or how about a literary mash-up of Jane Eyre and the Cat in the Hat? Said no one ever. 

 

2. Write it without stopping. 

 

I keep writing. Put words to paper. Even if I think it’s too much, too long, too violent, too erotic, or even has way too many sentences with the word too in it. I Just write through the scene. And then start another one because I don’t want to edit as I go. 

 

3. Don’t edit as you go. 

 

I don’t rework a scene after I’ve written it. Maybe I have thoughts about how to change it, and I’ll jot those thoughts down in my notes and move on to the next scene. I don’t spell-check it or put it through Grammarly or tweak it yet. I just keep going. 

 

4. I don’t judge it. 

 

I don’t stop in the middle of a sentence and say, “Well, that’s a dumb sentence.” Or “I need another word. I should find a better word. Let’s check thesaurus.com. Well, hellloooo, Reddit.” I don’t do that. Because my brain is smart and, when I revise, it will tell me how dumb I was when I chose that word in the first place. But with the added benefit of future intelligence. Because we all know we’re smarter in the future than we are in the present. I even feel smarter than just two sentences ago. So, I might end up cutting a whole paragraph when I reread it, and my future-self is glad my stupid past-self didn’t waste time on that one word even though it sounds perfect for a sentence I don’t even want anymore. 

 

During the first draft, I’m in writing mode, getting words down. I can’t stop in the middle of hitting a baseball and analyze what’s wrong with my swing. I swing and then analyze. I write and then revise. Don’t like sports? How’s this analogy: I can’t stop in the middle of being chased by a maniacal ax-murderer and say, “Hm, should I change my stride? I should Run on my toes. No, my heels. No, wait, which one is better? Damn, if I’d just bought some foam inserts.” 

I just keep going. 

 

5. Don’t show it to anyone. 

 

Okay, there are people who show the first chapter or two to a reader to see if they’re on the right track. And that can help hone a voice for the story, and voice is good to help a writer get started on a novel. Giving the first chapter to someone can also help to see if it starts in the right place. 

 

But if I’m halfway through a novel and I’m giving it to someone to read, I have to ask myself why. Am I just stuck and procrastinating? Do I just want encouragement? Someone to say, “Yeah, yeah, this pretty good. Keep going.”? It’s a fine excuse. But am I stalling to write the rest of it because I don’t have a middle? 

 

The challenge of giving someone half a story is that they can’t really evaluate it honestly. That doesn’t mean they won’t be honest. It means the story is more than the first forty-thousand words, and the last forty-thousand are just as, if not more important, than the first half. Think of how many horror movies start out creepy and interesting and fun and wind up with the character victoriously walk away, thinking they killed the monster only to have the creature rise up, look at the audience, then eat the camera.  

 

No one praises a finished novel if it has a great first half and a bad last half. In fact, the first half is going to start looking worse b/c of the bad second half. No one cares how good you look if your date to a wedding is dressed in blackface. Yeah, your second half can be that bad. 

 

And the danger is that giving it to someone at that point can seriously derail momentum. If you get stuck, I suggest going back to do some more plotting. Figure out what NEEDS to happen next in order for the plot to move forward. 

 

If you do end up giving your half-novel to a reader for critique, then make sure they’re experienced in critical reading, someone who knows what they’re talking about, and you trust their opinion. Giving your adventure novel to a friend who likes Marvel movies but never reads can lead you down a path where you add ten minutes of credits and then reveal a post-credits scene after that. It doesn’t even make sense!

 

6. I try not to get caught up in my own brilliance. 

 

I know what you’re saying, “This one’s more about you, Hamilton.” And you’re right. It usually is.  

 

After I’ve finished a draft, I have to remind myself that it will need work. Maybe a lot of work. The first screenplay I wrote, I felt great about. I pantsed my way through that thing like an aviator heading to Long Beach. It had twists and turns, and stuff happened, and when I gave it to a far more experienced writer, he came back with insightful questions like: “What?” and “Why does he do this?” And “Who’s that character?” and “What does she want?” and finally, “Here’s a couple of books you should read if you want to write something less confusing.” 

 

It’s a big accomplishment to finish a novel, even a bad one that I’m absolutely sure is really good, only to get feedback that it’s not good at all. And that can really deflate passion for the project. But all it means is that it needs more work. More refinement. Which is completely normal and a part of the process. You think the person who looked at the initial sketches of the Guggenheim was impressed? 

“It’s a bloody circle, Frank. You’re past your prime, Man.” 

 

If I go into it more humbly, knowing that it still needs a lot of work, then it’s better to be pleasantly surprised than it is to be precipitously dispirited when I do give it to someone to read. By the way, Precipitously Dispirited is the new alcohol-free vodka for teenagers and the sponsor for this episode. Get your kids turnt on all the flavors: grape, lime, and potato. 

 

7. Celebrate. 

 

I believe in ritual. Joseph Campbell said that “the function of rituals…is to give form to human life, not in…surface arrangement, but in depth.”

 

Or something like that. 

 

And celebrations are rituals that are very important. Because let’s face it, few people are celebrating us. So celebrate yourself. And not just when you’ve finished the whole novel. Celebrate when you’ve had a good writing day, when you’ve figured out how to fix that plot hole, when you’ve nailed the dialogue. Little celebrations along the way can help you finish the whole thing. Then, when you do finish, Have a big celebration. 

 

That might just be grabbing your significant other and a glass of champagne or chocolate cake or homemade orange juice popsicles and having an afternoon or a dinner or even ten minutes of jumping up and down and saying, “Yes! I wrote a novel. A whole novel. In your face, Dad—I mean doubt.” 

 

Do you know how many people want to write a novel and don’t? I don’t either, but extrapolating from the people I do know personally who do but won’t, I think it’s a lot. So congratulate yourself. Tell others who are supportive and will congratulate you too. And if you don’t have friends or family or know anyone on a human, interpersonal level, Twitter can be a great place for support. As much as I suffer Twitter, there are a lot of lovely people out there who are very giving in our writing community. 

 

8. I give it time after I’m done. 

 

I gotta be honest, I eat too fast, I skip the boring parts in movies, and I speed meditate, which, sure sounds counterintuitive, but that’s only because you’re not as far along in enlightenment since you meditate slower than me. 

So it’s a challenge, but I don’t look at my first draft for at least a whole week after I’ve finished it. If I can go longer, that’s better. That distance is going to help me significantly when I need to look at it with a more objective eye. This is a good time to have other projects. 

 

What, you say? You don’t have another novel to write. Good. Because that gives you time to think about marketing and query letters and maybe even using the time to devise an outline of the novel you just wrote (do it from memory). Just don’t touch the manuscript. One of my mistakes that I often make as a writer is avoiding—I mean—overlooking all of the other business things I need to do if I’m going to get my novel agented and published and read by people who I haven’t gifted it to. So I do things like:

--Work on my website. 

--Connect with writers online. 

--Read and critique other people’s work, which is a great way to get into a critiquing mind when I do pick up my novel again. 

--I can start an early query letter. Obviously, I still have a long way to go before I’m pitching to agents. But a Query letter can help me hone down my story to its essence, and I can see what would be interesting to potential agents and readers. It helps to get to the heart of my story. 

 

The sad truth is, writing a book does not mean people will want to read it. And so you need to do things that tell them how much they want to read it. 

 

Which brings me to …

 

9. Finally, I remind myself I’m in for the long haul. 

 

Finishing a first draft is just one step on a long path that leads to publishing a book you can be proud of, and if you keep going on that path, you’ll find more energy for the next step and the next and the next, until eventually, that path leads you to old age and then death. But before you hit that point, you gotta write and revise and query and tell people how great you are and why they should spend their precious time reading something you wrote. Because you got something to say. Even if it’s about gnomes and unicorns.  

 

First drafts are challenging and often are relegated to the half-assed attempts that sit in a file on our computer or in Google docs and, at best, become emblems of nostalgia, and, at worst, patterns of failure. They don’t have to be either. Sure, I might finish my first novel, and it might only be read by me, and the bored Indonesian hacker looking for my tax information. But finishing is a gigantic accomplishment that I should celebrate.

 

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, as someone who doesn’t really like hiking or heights or cold, writing a novel is harder than climbing Mt. Everest. 

 

Because let’s face it, any selfish bastard can climb Mt. Everest if they have enough money and sherpa labor hauling their packs to the next camp. But few can put forward the effort and time and discipline needed to write and rewrite and reread and rewrite a novel until it’s polished and ready and selling on Amazon for ninety-nine cents. 

 

Okay, it’s not the most accurate analogy, but you get my point. 

 

And so I end today with a quote from Jon Krakauer, a man who both wrote books and climbed Mt. Everest. He says: 

 

“Everest has always been a magnet for kooks, publicity seekers, hopeless romantics, and others with a shaky hold on reality.” 

 

See? My climber-writer analogy doesn’t seem so dissimilar now, does it? But we can scale that mountain, friend. We can make it. As long as we keep stepping, breathe cans of fresh air, and keep the blood circulating into our extremities. 

 

 

So write! Write, my friends. Write like you’re saving a baby from a burning car. Because that baby is your novel. And that car is time.