In reply to Alicia Butcher Ehrhardt.

I don’t know anything about Dramatica. But I also don’t know what connection, if any, exists between the structure of a story/novel and the particular sequence of thought processes its author went through to produce it.

I don’t mean anything weird by “structure”…just the normal stuff. Say, 3 acts. Or 10 critical scenes. Or 4 acts, or writing a novel from the middle. Or a Hero’s Journey. Lots of people have different takes on the “best” lens through which to either read or create a novel, and there’s probably good value in most such schemes.

The “plotter vs. pantser” question should (again, my opinion) be considered an entirely separate question…no need for any of us to use unusual definitions. If a particular type of plot point seems to fit well in a particular part of a novel (say, at the end of Act 2/3, depending on the model in use), I don’t see how it’s better or worse to have written down what happens two months before the scene itself is drafted…or two years, or two minutes. I think it’s a bit silly of “pantsers” to say their method is superior for everybody, and also silly for “plotters” to say their method is superior. How’d the book turn out? Good? Bad? More likely in between.

It’s perfectly possible to plot out a book in great detail and either miss an obvious (to the reader) logical plot hole or “forget” the relevance of a self-reflective midpoint to the protagonist’s character arc. If any. Or to fail to include an inciting event aka initial disturbance. Or to commit a great many other sins.

It’s also possible for a pantser to write a boring, predictable, emotionally flat novel…regardless of how excited the pantser happened to be in the throes of creation.

A plotter can rewrite, and throw out huge chunks of a novel. So can a pantser. Neither is required to do so, and it’s not clear to me why it’s more likely one way vs. the other.

Say a plotter gets to Chapter 8, and so does a pantser. Say that for this particular novel it’s time for a bunch of intensifying conflict, the two protagonists to finally admit they want to get into bed togeher, and then for a sudden dramatic (apparent?) betrayal.

Maybe the plotter knew that in advance, months ago, and not much has changed. Maybe a lot has changed, and the outline/plot has been kept up to date throughout. Maybe it hasn’t. Maybe the pantser went in to the chapter with no idea of what the specific events would turn out to be…but had a pretty good idea of what’s happening in the story, and simply realized what type of events were called for.

It’s difficult to show that a person who’s just written chapters one through seven is going to know less about what should go into the eighth chapter than she would have known while outlining two months before. Pantsers can think about structure, and make changes as they go…at the end of the day, I don’t see what difference outlining/plotting in advance makes to the finished novel. Plotters like to say pantsers have to do a lot of rewriting and throw things away. Pantsers like to say plotters are less pure artistically and write boring books. I doubt any reader anywhere would be able to judge, by the finished book, which method was used to write it.

Is structure important? Sure. Are there 10 critical scenes? Not really. Lots of things that should happen, sure, but “scene” is somewhat artificial here…an event may be split between two or more. The particulars of that event (or series of related events) may change drastically between initial envisioning and final draft.

Do plotters have to slavishly follow an outline? Nope. Do pantsers have to eschew structure? Nope.

Plotters write an outline in advance that covers plot points. Pantsers don’t. And lots of people fall in between, sometimes (most of the time?) choosing different approaches for different books.

So for me…I find an outlined plot artificial and restrictive. Not because I don’t know what it’s for. Not because I don’t understand the value of structure. Instead, it’s because I tend to have revelations about the books I write throughout the process, and trying to keep an outline up to date is a huge (and depressing!) time sink. It’s just not useful. I don’t know how to stop having new ideas–which might influence the current scene, or earlier scenes, or scenes yet to be written–and simply proceed to make rational use of an outline. I think that would be really convenient, though. I’m not opposed to it…I just can’t make it work.

If I’m in the middle of a scene and get a new idea about some other scene, I drop a note to myself right there (sometimes mid-sentence, in parentheses) and go fix it later on. Sometimes “later” means later in the day, and sometimes it means the next month. Doesn’t matter. The note is the same as the fix/optimization/rewrite, as far as I’m concerned, while I’m busy generating new words. That way I can keep typing, and just proceed as if all the work I created via the note has already happened. It’s funny how often even changes that at first seem drastic can take only a few minutes to implement.

That process doesn’t work with an outline. Which makes me a pantser, I guess. But not for ideological reasons. It’s just that an outline, for me, is not useful…in my current process.

I want it to be useful. But my time is more productively spent either editing or writing.

Others have different processes. That doesn’t make them wrong, or silly, or delusional, or uninformed. It just means that (so far) they’ve found something that works better, for them, than what I do. I try new stuff fairly often. Others may or may not. It’s all fine with me.

In reply to David.

Ah. Structure is the key.

Since I use Dramatica to plot, STRUCTURE is there to guide me on what will happen in the plot, not the other way around.

Structure is key (to me, anyway) on how the mind perceives the story as a whole, and the reason many, maybe most, novels feel as if they’re missing something. They are.

By the time the end is reached, every possible alternative solution should have been examined and discarded – except the one the author was aiming at. Not by fiat, but by how the story itself deals with their possibilities.

The writing itself, if good enough, can cover some missing structure, but even those books can feel as if they leave something out.

Now all we have to define is what you mean by ‘structure.’ Too bad we can’t sit down and compare. But it’s always interesting poking at the terminology we use to describe what we do.

Thanks for providing an interesting topic.

In reply to Alicia Butcher Ehrhardt.

The funny thing here is how similarly I feel about “pantsing”…enormous freedom, within the structure of a plot. But for me, the structure matters–and the specifics don’t, or at any rate they don’t until I get to them.

I don’t feel I need to know in advance what the specific plot points, doors of no return, beats, or whatever actually will turn out to be. That doesn’t mean I don’t know why they matter, or need (almost always) to happen in particular places. In fact “knowing in advance” just doesn’t work for me. It freezes my brain.

A lot of folks seem to buy what seems to me to be a false dichotomy: that plotters use structure, and pantsers don’t. I think that might be true of some of both, but I think it’s a actually a separate question from the plotter-pantser debate. In the end, it’s a question (in my opinion, at least so far) of what it takes for a particular writer to feel a useful level of confidence. And freedom. And, you know, get some writing done. Very possibly a moving target, as well as being improperly understood by us all.

OTOH, as my recent posts clearly show, I’m no productivity or writing expert. I’m still trying to figure this stuff out. Making some progress, maybe. Or maybe held back by blocks I can’t yet perceive. Who knows? Not I.

Thanks for the comments!

In reply to David.

Almost more than useful and logical, the wayI find it works for me is to give me a huge stable platform. I know where everything in the story (the big plot points) will be, and that there is a logic that runs beginning to end.

Then the individual pieces give me enormous freedom – because I know that as long as I hit the plot points, character points, etc., assigned to a scene, I can do whatever strikes me for the how. I find it allows me to write a much taller skyscraper. If that makes sense. Because the elevator, water, and electricity go all the way to the top.

In reply to Alicia Butcher Ehrhardt.

Yes…incomprehensible…luckily it’s the process that baffles me, not the books that end up being produced! Well, mostly. {8’>

I really would like to be able to write a book from a plotted-type outline, though. It seems so useful and logical.

As soon as the flu goes away, I’m back to writing. Pantsers are incomprehensible to me – I’m an Extreme Plotter.

Takes all kinds.