To Plot or to Pants? How Do You Write?

Writing tips from 10-year-olds, Kickstarters and our inevitable progress towards crabs

Full disclosure, I’m not entirely sure this post’s title is a rhetorical question - on any given day of the week, most writers I know aren’t entirely sure how they do what they do, regardless of whether they’re a plotter or a pantser.

After writing as a job for my entire adult life, the only firm conclusion that I’ve reached is that how you write is a question of sitting still for long enough so that the circulation stops below the L1 vertebra of the spine. My guess is that the resultant constriction sends blood and stuff (Goo? Juice? Chi?) to your creative brain and the rest follows semi-naturally. I will offer a caveat here, that despite what I say when I meet someone at a party, I’m not a doctor.

The main reason for this post is because I’m inordinately proud of having done this:

What is this blurry monstrosity, you might well ask. Well, it’s my next book and it’s possibly also the reason why I won’t get my security deposit back from the office I’m renting. But the more important thing is that it’s a visual representation of what I’m doing. It’s a map for the mind. A mind map, if you will (TM). And, gloriously, as I finish a chapter I get to strike down that piece of paper with the swipe of a red felt-tip pen and shudder with joy. This is how I write, by plotting it all out in great detail and then (mostly) following through with that plan, aside from the occasions when I realise that it would all be much better if my main character was a woman instead of a man, and even better still if they were a crab instead of a man.*

I frequently discuss the plotter vs pantser pathway with my 10-year-old niece, Sophie. She is a writer too and a die-hard pantser, so she can’t quite understand why I go to all the bother of figuring out what happens at every level of the book. For her, the enjoyment is the discovery as she creates. Her strategy is to draw the cover of the book and then decide whether she likes it enough to warrant writing the story. Sometimes that means that she might only get a few pages into a story (annoyingly, because I then want to read what happened next!) But other times it means she enjoys the ride of figuring things out as they happen. Just the thought of doing that without a mind map, in-depth character profiles and an entire wall of reference photos makes me sweat.

That said, check out some of her covers and tell me you wouldn’t read them!

Amazing, huh? Anyway, despite the fact that her covers are outrageously good, she’s wrong. Plotting is the only way to keep things sane and it’s how I write.

My other point to today’s rather rambling post, was that I’m pondering about the idea of doing a Kickstarter for the next book. I’ve been inspired by other indie authors who have run really inventive campaigns. As I see it, the real advantage is that it gives my existing readers an exclusive opportunity to get the book and some one-off merchandise before it goes live on Amazon, which despite its reach is a really drab platform. I don’t know, I thought I’d throw it out to you, if I ran a Kickstarter would you back it?

Feel free to add a comment below if you’ve seen any great Kickstarter campaigns, or if you’ve got any ideas for the sort of perks that readers actually want to get (aside from the book, I think that’s a given).

Write soon.

*I was recently introduced to the concept of carcinisation. Namely, the fact that evolution seems to want to turn everything into a crab. TL,DR we’re going to need to take a long hard look at the design of the laptop keyboard.