This is one that just bugs me, mostly because amateur writers tend to be so absurdly touchy about just about everything. They will ask for advice and when you offer it, no matter how delicately you do so, they will freak out because they don’t want to do what you’ve suggested. They want to continue doing all of the “bad” things they’ve been doing, they just want a “good” outcome.

Reality doesn’t really work that way!

While I’m sure this applies to a couple of different things, I am, of course, talking about the difference between pantsing and plotting novels. This kind of thing tends to show up in threads about writer’s block and lots of people will post that writer’s block is caused by two things: not knowing where you’re going and not being confident enough in your ability to get there.

The second one, that’s something that you just have to work on and honestly, the complete lack of self-confidence these days is just absurd. It’s like nobody trusts themselves to run down to the corner store for milk anymore. Whatever modern parenting has done to these kids, it’s screwed them up something fierce.

Some of that is bad expectations, I’m sure. Everyone seems to think that if you’re not guaranteed immediate success with your first try, then it isn’t worth doing at all. There is no learning curve. You have to be a master the first time out or you shouldn’t try at all. That just doesn’t work for writing or any other creative endeavor. I’ve written about that before and won’t belabor it again.

However, getting back to the first point before I go too far afield, the suggestion typically is, if you don’t know where you’re  going, plot your book and figure it out up front.

Now I’ve been a big advocate of that for a long time. That’s not to say that pantsing can’t work, there are plenty of big name authors who do it that way, but they’ve been doing it for a long, long time, they have their own methodology and, frankly, they’ve often got the time to dither around and figure out their stories in their own way, but I doubt there are any production writers like me out there who are pantsing their way through life.

I’ve tried to be sensitive to people who are emotionally attached to their pantsing ways, but there’s only so far that can go. “How can I know what’s  going on in my story without knowing what’s going on in my story?” You can’t. If you want to take the advice that’s being offered, then you have to be willing to at least try it a different way. It’s like saying “I don’t want to be an alcoholic but I don’t want to give up drinking!” Yeah, too bad.

But even if you decide that you have to keep pantsing, at least be self-aware enough to understand that any advice given to you that requires plotting, you should simply disregard instead of continually complaining “you’re disrespecting my process!” Well, wait a minute, you came here complaining that your process doesn’t work, but now you are demanding that you don’t want to change anything, you just want to get different results. That’s the very definition of insanity!

I saw someone post a really wonderful description of why plotting works as well as it does. It divorces the drudgery of story construction, making sure you hit the proper beats, ensuring  you have the correct pacing, plotting compelling story elements, etc., from the creative side of crafting prose. Once you get yourself into a flow state, you don’t want to have to drag yourself out by slamming into a creative wall, not knowing what happens next.

It’s why I’ve always said that my writing process is “easy”, “easy” being a comparative and not declarative word, because all of the hard work coming up with the story, building characters, ensuring I’m hitting all of the story beats when and where I need to, etc., in order to craft a well-designed story, all of that comes up front. That is a long time, often years in my case, just rolling it around in my head until the ideas start to gel, then a couple of days getting it all down on “paper” in a format that I can utilize to run it through my head and conclude that’s the story that I want to tell. By the time I actually get writing, I don’t have to worry about where I’m going. I know that. I just have to get there.

I will know what a particular chapter needs to accomplish before I start to write it. That doesn’t mean there aren’t moments of creativity at the writing stage. Yesterday, in fact, I had realized that there needed to be some excuse for how a character could get into a place where they’d decided, on the spur of the moment, that they needed to go. Then I realized that I’d already written the solution. I just needed to connect the dots. When you know where you’re going, even if you don’t know every last little detail, your brain still recognizes the problems and fills in the details, even if  you’re not consciously aware of what you’re doing.

“But that makes writing boring!” I’ve heard this a lot, even from my best friend who is a published author. Of course, at the time, he was writing in genres that didn’t require any mental capacity to jot down a bog standard tale. Most books in the genres he was working in all followed the same tropes regardless, he just had to mix and match elements and characters and churn out mindless junk. Then he turned his attention to science fiction and fantasy and he found he couldn’t do that. His first attempt was a disaster. He had decades of reading sci-fi and fantasy under his belt, but coming up with a coherent original story pantsing, he just couldn’t do it, at least not without going through a lot more drafts and a lot more time than he had any interest in pursuing.

Therefore, I told him to plot. Take a week. Create your characters. Decide on the story you wanted to tell. Set it all in motion in your brain and write down the results. He’s a good storyteller that was so focused on the prose that he forgot how to tell a good story. He tried it. He hated it but it worked. He started putting out good, coherent, well-written books again in a genre that requires a lot more planning than he was used to. It’s still a work in progress, he’s still learning how to give up a lot of the plug-and-play techniques he’d done before because those absolutely do not work, but he’s  getting better.

Now he could have refused to take that advice and just kept stumbling around, wasting time and producing nothing of substance in the time that he had available but he didn’t. He gave it an honest attempt. It was his choice, of course, he could do things however he wants to do things, but the one part that doesn’t get anyone anywhere is whining.

There’s an awful lot of whining in writer circles. Maybe, if you want help, you should listen instead of complain. Just a suggestion though. It seems ultimately self-defeating demanding solutions and then rejecting all solutions because they require that you do something different. Maybe what you’re doing now just doesn’t work? If you’re not willing to change, why ask at all?