How does a pantser/non-outliner work in real life? Well, I know one well enough to give some insight into how his mind works (or doesn’t work as the case may be). That would be me. I can’t speak for other pantsers, can’t tell you how they think. However, I can tell you that it is not the stereotypical figure put forth by many plotters/outliners.
What I like to do is create a scene of emotional import to me. And by scene, I don’t mean the mini-stories that make up a book. In a romance film, it might be the man kissing the woman. If approached correctly, it could be quite emotional, what with the proper music, the looks on their faces, the sun setting over the palm trees, and all that good stuff, coupled with his declaration of undying love.
Okay, Romance, that’s not my “bag”, as we used to say way back when. Science Fiction is. So how do I go about writing a Science Fiction novel? Well, I get little thoughts floating around in my brain, and they finally coalesce into something bigger. Let’s take a look at a book I wrote, “Ghost Fleet”, and how it came about.
Well, for this, we have to go all the way back to when I was about 10 years old. I saw a movie called “Sink the Bismarck” on TV. (For those who don’t know, KMS Bismarck was a German battleship in World War 2 that sank the pride of the British fleet (HMS Hood) and then was sunk herself, three days later.)
A while later, I found the C.F. Forester book of the same title in my school library. I took it out, read it, and became interested in naval warfare. I built plastic models of ships and read accounts of various naval battles and campaigns. As I grew older and became interested in Science Fiction, naval battles on oceans occasionally turned into naval battles in space. Let’s just say I was interested in ships.
In 1980, I saw a movie, “Final Countdown”, where a modern US supercarrier goes through some sort of vortex which takes it back in time to December 1941, shortly before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Time travel and naval ships got linked together in my mind.
One day, many years later, while walking along, doing not much else, I thought about some of those ill-fated ships like Bismarck, Hood, Arizona, Yamato, Graf Spee, Exeter, Houston and others. I wondered how they might fare if they came through time and engaged in a modern war -- just the opposite of what happened in "Final Countdown". And that idea floated around for some years. It might make an interesting story, but to just have these ships appear and engage in battle wouldn’t be enough to really make a good story. What would?
Well, if those ships appeared as “saviours” to a group/nation/alliance that had defeat staring it in the face, and then changed the tide, that might be emotional.
Emotional is the key word. I want what I write to have meaning – even if only to me. In a book or a movie, I want to see some wrenching scene that will make me want to cheer or bring tears to my eyes, something that will grip me deep within the very heart of me. If you put something like that in your book or movie, you’ll have me, and I’ll watch/read it time after time.
The typical approach for the "savior" scene, which became a trope, found its place in the old Westerns. The wagon train became surrounded by attackers. It formed itself into a defensive circle, with the defenders outnumbered, out-gunned, and in danger of losing everything to the attackers. Then, when all looked lost, they would cut to a scene of a troop of the US Cavalry moving up. The bugler would sound the charge as they came galloping to the rescue, driving off the attackers. Makers of the movies counted on the emotional change from despair, to hope, to relief to give their audiences the emotional connection that would guarantee success for the venture.
Grabbing victory from the jaws of defeat can give one that emotional thrill. Now, I can’t really have ships like Bismarck and Hood come back from the past to save the world. But I can set this in space, in the far future or in an alternate universe.
Imagine, if you will, you’re on a planet expecting an enemy attack, getting ready for a battle – one which you know you can’t win. Then, reinforcements arrive. These reinforcements won’t necessarily “save the day”, but for the defenders it is a boost in morale. It is not “snatching victory from the jaws of defeat” that I’m looking for, but the deep resignation of being abandoned, knowing that you are going to die for your cause – alone -- and then gaining allies. Going from despair to hope. Powerful stuff.
Being alone is a fear that many of us have, dying alone just makes it worse. But it all changes when someone else joins you, has your back. You may still go down fighting, but when you have that someone watching your back, fighting with you, taking a part in your struggle, you have a whole different feeling about the matter. That's what makes "buddy movies" so popular.
That became my emotional scene – the arrival of reinforcements. To make it emotional, those who are manning the defences have to have lost hope. They’ve been abandoned. They intend to put up a fight anyway – for a just cause – but know that they don’t stand a chance.
Word comes in that the enemy is on the way and everyone prepares for that doom. There’s nothing quite so bad as being abandoned by those you thought were there to protect you, so the people of my planet and their few defenders in the ships circling it are rightly of a sombre mood. Despair has crept in.
Then, when the supposed “enemy fleet” drops out of hyperspace, and the defenders are braced for a final battle against impossible odds, they realize that this fleet has come to help and those who make up the crews of these ships are willing to die alongside the defenders. The defenders are no longer alone. And if this force came to aid them, maybe others will as well. Hope has arrived.
To me, this is very powerful. To you it may not be, but as we’re talking about my writing method, it will do as an example. Because it means something to me, I’ve been thinking about it for many years. Never really considering what to do with it, but bringing it up from time to time from the back-burners of my mind. It’s simple: When all looks lost, a fleet from “the past” shows up not necessarily to turn the tide, but to help.
Meanwhile, I’ve been hard at work (so to speak) on my first novel and the occasional short story. Been working on that novel for years, slowly getting further and further into it. Maybe, some year, I’ll finish it; maybe some year I’ll take another look at that emotional scene. Time passes and I'm actually getting close to finishing Novel #1. Maybe this year, I thought.
My girlfriend comes to town and I sing her a few lines to a song – and she doesn’t believe it’s a real song. ("Wasn’t that a Party" by The Irish Rovers). I stop into a 2nd hand music store and go searching through the cassette tapes (remember those) and find an Irish Rovers album which has that song on it. I chortle, filled with glee. I’ll show her! I buy the cassette tape, plug it into the player in my vehicle and am able to say, “I told you so!” to my girlfriend who has to suffer through the song. But … and it’s a big “but” … the tape also has a song called, “The Day the Tall Ships Came” on it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmPTJMHV_Cc
I’ve never heard the song before, but when it plays, I’m reminded of my “scene”. Suddenly it comes together. I’m going to write that scene! I drop work on my other novel and start writing because now I have the inspiration. 58 days later I complete the first draft. No outline, no wasted scenes, no irrelevant tangents.
How did I go from, “When all looks lost, a fleet from “the past” shows up not necessarily to turn the tide, but to help,” from despair to hope, to conclusion in 80,000 words in less than two months?
Simple, I knew where I was going and I wrote to get there. All I needed was a starting point. Once I had my starting point, every scene I wrote took me further along the path to getting to that scene. It’s like walking across a snowy field, keeping to a straight line because you’re looking up at your goal and walking towards it.
Just looking at the scene I wanted to write, many questions came up that gave me my starting point. We’re in a war and this fleet from the past comes to help. So, who are we at war with? Why are things so dire? Why does this fleet show up to help? What makes it a fleet from “the past”? and other questions like that.
Well, fleets just don’t simply show up in the nick of time to help out – or, going back to the Westerns, the US Cavalry doesn’t just happen upon the besieged wagon train. No, someone goes for help and brings them back. Who? Now I have my protagonist – the man (or woman) who goes for help. Why this particular guy? Well, he must have some connection to that fleet. Okay. Where has that fleet been these past 300 years? They left the group of human planets because of [reason] and were thought to be destroyed. That’s why no one has been looking for them. But protagonist gets some information – inciting incident – which gives him a hint that they might still exist and his commanders send him off looking as a PR stunt, because, hey, possibility of a 2-front war and gotta keep up the morale of the troops.
That’s all I need. Off I go. My Lieutenant Britlot gets news that his parents were killed in the war and he receives what remains of their possessions including an old diary from his ancestor which causes him to believe that not all of that departing fleet were destroyed three centuries earlier. He becomes obsessed by the idea that he might have relatives “out there somewhere”.
Just like the reader previously mentioned whose mind jumps ahead, I don’t sit there and write one scene, then try to think of the next scene that will lead me eventually to my “emotional scene”. No, my mind jumps ahead to all sorts of possibilities. I take the most interesting ones, ones that will lead me on to that scene that I want to write. The story gets more complicated. Ideas fly in about what might happen five, ten, fifteen chapters beyond the spot where I’m now writing.
Now, that scene that I want to write, it isn’t the climax of the book. In fact, it occurs about half to three-quarters of the way through it. I have no idea how the book will end at this point in time. However, the closer I get to that scene, the further ahead my mind jumps, so by the time I actually do write my scene, I’ve already decided – more or less – how the book is going to end. I just don’t know exactly how I’m going to get there.
However, I now have my next “big scene” to write towards: that end scene. And all my previous scenes limit any fanciful tangent that may come up.
If I want to drive from the West Coast to the East Coast and I get to the Great Lakes, no matter how lovely the Arctic Ocean or the Baja Peninsula might seem, I’m not about to take that sort of a detour. Any visions of the Great White North or the Sunny Southwest aren’t going to make it into a revised itinerary. The further I go towards my goal, the less possible it is to go off to one side or another – the infamous tangents that plotters accuse us pantsers of taking.
My ending might change as a new and wonderful idea comes up, but that only means that I’ll hit the East Coast at Halifax or Washington DC instead of New York City. Texas or the Northwest Territories, though possible when I set out from Vancouver or LA, won’t come into the picture now. They can't; I'm too far along.
The process of pantsing a book works much like a funnel. You may start from anywhere in the plane of the wide opening of that funnel, from the rim to the centre. But as you travel further down towards your goal of the narrow end, your possibilities become fewer. You can still go from side to side, but as you move forward (down), those sides are closing in. And when you get to the spout, your options have decreased to very few indeed. Everything behind you sends you to that one place where you generally or specifically aimed at from the beginning.
Now, in “Ghost Fleet” I didn’t know how the book would end when I started. My emotional scene came 2/3rds (I just looked) of the way through the book. At that point I still didn’t know how it would end, though my mind was closing in on it, and though the ending surprised me in a delightful way, by the time I'd reached the 3/4 way point, I'd pretty much nailed it down. Then I just wrote towards it.
Most other “emotional scenes” that I write towards occur much later. “In the Company of Cowards” had the scene occur at the 85% mark, but I knew how it would end before I finished the third chapter. The contents still surprised me all along the way, but not when they happened, for my mind had already considered those possibilities a few chapters previous and they all made sense for what I wanted the story to be about. No tangents.
So, is that plotting (in the pantsers’ definition of plotting)? No. Is it pantsing (in the plotters’ definition of pantsing) No.
But it is "discovery writing", and as an experienced writer, I know enough to "go with the flow". I don't go off on tangents that need pruning and a desperate turn to get me back on track like plotters seem to feel that I would. It just doesn't happen. It hasn't ever happened, and I've written over 20 novels. I just finished a massive one which I'll publish shortly. I did more initial work on it than I usually do, but that was with characters, not plot, and within a short time of beginning writing, even that got thrown out as the characters didn't behave like I had figured they might. So, 248,000 words later, I finished. No tangents that needed to be pruned. But a lot of stuff really surprised and delighted me, stuff that I had no intention of putting into the book when I began.
In one spot I feared that the "tangent effect" might actually come true. I had no idea why my characters were doing what they were doing and what they would find when they got to the place I had them going to. But I trusted myself and wrote on. By the time they got there, the perfect answer had arrived. Though it slightly changed the course of the book, It still had me going in the right direction, and made it (the story) all the better.
Now, "Ghost Fleet" didn't end up being 80,000 words. And, no, I didn't cut out tangents. Instead I added about 24,000 words to it, bringing in side plots that would make the emotional scene more emotional, and filling in spaces where holes may have existed. Again. No tangents.
So, why do plotters believe this tangent stuff about pantsing? I guess it's just easier to believe a stereotype that "proves" the point that they have the "better method". But we'll go into that further next week.
Stay tuned for "Plotter Wars V: End Game".
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