So I’m trying the 21-Day Plan Your Novel Challenge from PlotHacker to help me with novel writing, and I just did the first day’s exercise, which is basically just, get all your thoughts about the story down on “paper” (or, in my case, Scrivener). I’m doing this for a story that’s been developing in my head for more than ten years, and even just this small first step made me realize something:

I am not a pantser.

There are a couple of different “types” of writers that I’ve stumbled upon in the great wide world of the internet: pantsers and plotters. Plotters work with outlines. Pantsers are the type of writers who literally sit down in front of a blank page or screen and start writing, developing a story as they go. They have minimal prep ahead of time–I’ve read from a number of them that it often feels as if the story is writing itself, and they’re just the scribe. (Side note: many writers fall somewhere in between these–it’s a spectrum, and everyone has a slightly different writing method.)

I’ve tried the Pantser method of writing for a variety of different stories. It can work for me in short story format, kind of. At least, I’ve written short stories using it.

But the problem with that is, it usually requires quite a bit of revision–at least, that’s what I’ve found. And if I’m writing something longer, something that I can’t whip out in an extended moment of inspiration, then I just run out of steam. I get bored of my own story.

When I write nonfiction, however, I’ve always found success with writing using an outline (that is, excluding blog posts like these, where they’re more stream-of-consciousness). I’m 100% plotter. I start with a bulleted list that usually looks something like this:

• Introduction/Thesis
• Main Point 1
  • Evidence
  • Evidence
  • Evidence
• Main Point 2
  • Evidence
  • Evidence
  • Evidence
• … [continue with all main points] …
• Conclusion

Then, I’ll flesh everything out as I’m pulling out my research and quotes. I’ll usually know what my goal is from the start, and then I can use that to guide what sort of evidence I’m looking for to support it (or, occasionally, to refute it, depending on what the topic is). I can fill those quotes in and use them to determine how to word my main points. And as the outline gets fleshed out, I then use it to write the paper, turning each bullet point into sentences or paragraphs until it’s done.

My favorite part about this? Most of the revisions get done at the beginning. You don’t have to go back through after you’ve written your rough draft and completely rewrite–you really only need to keep fleshing things out and clarifying them until you’re done with the paper, or whatever you’re working on, and then you check your grammar and turn it in.

It’s a very systematic approach to writing, but it works very well for me. I’ve produced convincing papers in a variety of classes using this formula.

And then when it comes to fiction, I just kind of throw it all out the window and hope for the best?

In hindsight, it’s honestly reasonable that this hasn’t worked for me like… at all.

So I’m trying out this novel planning challenge and even if it doesn’t end up working for my brain, I’ve already benefited a lot from it by confirming that I am, in fact, a plotter, I have always been a plotter, and I can be a plotter when writing fiction too.

And honestly I think this will work out better for my stories in other ways, too. I’ve always loved stories that fit together so tightly like a well-formed 3D puzzle, where you don’t really fully know where you’re going until you get there, but then when you do, you can look back and see how each and every piece fits together to form the whole.

Just look at The Broken Earth Trilogy by N.K. Jemisin (I think she’s a plotter), and you’ll see what I mean. Or the Mistborn trilogy by Brandon Sanderson (he’s basically a plotter). Or A Pattern of Shadow and Light by Melissa McPhail (how does she do this as a pantser???).

As a reader, it feels like I’m travelling through the story as a ride-along pantser, so maybe that’s why I thought that’s how I’d write stories like this too? But in reality, novel writing like this takes a lot of planning–or, at least, it will for me. And I’m honestly kind of excited about writing fiction again because of it.