I'm a Pantser
What does that mean? Simply put, it means I write by the seat of my pants with no elaborate outlines or planning. I let my muse lead the way with the only guidance being a place to start, an inkling of the middle, and a potential end.
This freedom from planning allows me to jot off a Twitterfic in just a few minutes, often with just the beginning of the story the only thing I have, or to write a microfiction based on a noun, adjective and verb prompt in thirty minutes, from start to edited finish. I get a flash of inspiration and the muse takes over.
When I sit down at the computer to work on a story, I may have a thought about where things are going to be heading then I start typing and, almost like magic, the words appear on the screen in front of me and I will have no idea where they're coming from as I'm no longer consciously thinking but am in an almost zen-like state.
A few years ago, I decided to do the outline and plotting method for a novel I was going to write for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). It was lovely. I had it all planned out. I started writing the story, following the plan. Then suddenly my muse pointed out that the story was no longer the one I had started out to write but something completely different. It went from a story about a teenage boy who finds the hiding place of the Aepyornis, a believed to be extinct bird, in Madagascar to one about a teenage boy whose grandmother dies, turning his world upside down and the story of how he comes to terms with his grief. The bird in the original story is replaced by an antique sports car that his grandmother was going to give him on his 17th birthday to fix up.
My pantser nature and muse completely overrode the planning and I was left with a vastly different story. I haven't finished the story. Ten days after it started teenager's grandmother died and I was dealing with the realities of having a child who was grieving for their grandmother. It was a bit too close to home and I had to stop writing it. I might be able to go back to it now that there has been some distance and see where it takes me.
So, in a nutshell, that's what a pantser is. What is your writing style?
This freedom from planning allows me to jot off a Twitterfic in just a few minutes, often with just the beginning of the story the only thing I have, or to write a microfiction based on a noun, adjective and verb prompt in thirty minutes, from start to edited finish. I get a flash of inspiration and the muse takes over.
When I sit down at the computer to work on a story, I may have a thought about where things are going to be heading then I start typing and, almost like magic, the words appear on the screen in front of me and I will have no idea where they're coming from as I'm no longer consciously thinking but am in an almost zen-like state.
A few years ago, I decided to do the outline and plotting method for a novel I was going to write for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). It was lovely. I had it all planned out. I started writing the story, following the plan. Then suddenly my muse pointed out that the story was no longer the one I had started out to write but something completely different. It went from a story about a teenage boy who finds the hiding place of the Aepyornis, a believed to be extinct bird, in Madagascar to one about a teenage boy whose grandmother dies, turning his world upside down and the story of how he comes to terms with his grief. The bird in the original story is replaced by an antique sports car that his grandmother was going to give him on his 17th birthday to fix up.
My pantser nature and muse completely overrode the planning and I was left with a vastly different story. I haven't finished the story. Ten days after it started teenager's grandmother died and I was dealing with the realities of having a child who was grieving for their grandmother. It was a bit too close to home and I had to stop writing it. I might be able to go back to it now that there has been some distance and see where it takes me.
So, in a nutshell, that's what a pantser is. What is your writing style?
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