Are you a plotter or a pantster?
Ah, the eternal question posed of authors down the ages.
It’s something I always ask during interviews for my blog, Bookengine, which
celebrates children’s writers.
Are you a blind-panic seat-of-the-pants scribbler, or a
literary equivalent of a sat nav?
In a recent interview, Edge member Bryony Pearce told me
she was most definitely a plotter, something she discovered writing her first,
as yet unpublished, book. The first ten chapters were plotted, the rest ‘pantsed’
(Bryony’s lovely descriptive verb) and the feedback was loud and clear: the
first half was great, the second not so. Now Bryony thoroughly plans her stories before she puts
pen to paper, with wonderful results.
Each writer is different, of course, and one man’s road
map is another man’s dead-end.
So, for your entertainment, here are some famous names,
divided into the two camps.
Plotters:
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| Charles Dickens |
Dickens
mapped out his novels. But as they were serialised in magazines, he only looked
as far ahead as the next edition. His notes were sketchy, often just questions
to provoke ideas jotted down as they occurred to him.
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| Edgar Allen Poe |
Edgar Allan
Poe liked to plan backwards from the denouement.
In On the
Philosophy of Composition, he said: “Nothing is more clear than that every
plot, worth the name, must be elaborated to its dénouement before anything be
attempted with the pen. It is only with the dénouement constantly in view that
we can give a plot its indispensable air of consequence, or causation, by
making the incidents, and especially the tone at all points, tend to the
development of the intention."
Thriller
writer Jeffery Deaver takes plotting to an obsessive level. He spends eight
months on his synopsis, working out every minute twist and turn so that his
story ticks perfectly like a hand-crafted Swiss watch. Once this is done, the
writing is a breeze (he revises his manuscript a further 30 times!).
Ken Follett
also requires a fully-orchestrated outline before writing. He describes his
working method in great detail at his website: www.ken-follett.com/masterclass.
Pantsters:
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| Ray Bradbury |
The late Ray Bradbury wrote several essays in Zen in the Art
of Writing about flying by the seat of the pants. He put his trust in his intuition and rhapsodised about
writing with ‘zest’ and ‘gusto’. For him, a plot was something discerned only after
the act of writing, like footprints left in the sand by a runner.
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| Stephen King |
Stephen King believes a story exists fully formed before
it is written and it is the author’s job to excavate it like a fossil. It is
inevitable bits will break off and the challenge is to remove as much in one
piece.
Michael Morpurgo generally doesn’t know his story’s
ending when he takes up his pen, preferring to let the story take him there.
His most famous book, War Horse, is one of the
exceptions. He always knew the boy and the horse would be reunited at the end
because there would be no story otherwise.
Meanwhile, horror author Dean Koontz may be unique in
being neither a plotter nor a ‘pantster’. He begins on page one and does not proceed to page two
until he has fully revised the page to his satisfaction. Quite how he manages
to control character development, plot and sub plot, is beyond me.
I ask the question again.
Are you a plotter or a ‘pantster’?
· Jeremy
Craddock blogs about children’s writers at www.bookengine.blogspot.co.uk
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| Jeremy Craddock who runs the wonderful Bookengine Blog (click here) |
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