Planning for Pantsers

I fully admit that I am a pantser by nature. I love to dive headfirst into writing and figure it out as I go… until it stops working and I hit the wall bug on a windshield style.

Over the years, I’ve tried to devise a way to balance out my discovery writer side, which I need to be enthused about writing, with my need to know where I’m going to avoid creating a colossal, unsolvable mess. I like to call this planning for pantsers, which sounds like an oxymoron, but if you’re someone who wishes they outlined but hates it immensely, some of what I mention below may be helpful to you. As with all writing advice, none of this is prescriptive. Trial and error is necessary to find your process, and what works for one book may not work for the next.

A Retrospective Outline

I have a whole blog post about this, which goes into more detail, but the basic idea is that I make an outline of what I’ve already written. I started doing this because I have a brain like a sieve and forget what I’ve already written, what threads I’ve added, details sprinkled in, etc. This caused me to reread my work-in-progress REPEATEDLY to the point that I would waste so much time rereading instead of writing that I was aggravating myself. To avoid rereading the whole thing, I would make an outline broken down by chapters which contained a bulleted list of what happens, including any important details or setting chunks, etc. that I might need to remember later. I have this as a Google Doc that I can leave open while I work on Microsoft Word (where I write my books).

This outline can be as detailed or sparse as you need, but the point of it is that you can easily recall what you already did in the book. You can always go back and add color coding or comments or whatever you need to make it more useful to you. I tend to add dates or days of the week if the timeline is important. If you are someone who goes back and forth fiddling with things, make sure to update your outline regularly to reflect that. As someone who does fiddle with things from the last chapter or so, what I do is update the outline once I’m about two chapters past it (ex. I will add chapter 6 to the outline once I’m on chapter 8) to avoid having to revise the outline regularly.

Sarra Cannon’s 3 Act Structure Outline

I love Sarra Cannon’s videos on Youtube, and I’ve taken both of her classes. She’s a really fantastic author who is eager to teach and share the resources that have helped her along the way. Her channel, Heart Breathings, has a lot of useful information for new authors and those who are further along in their careers.

Something I realized I struggled with was balancing the plot and threads of my stories to keep the pace from being “too slow.” I still think I write more emotionally-based, slower books, which is fine, but it was something I decided to work on. I watched Sarra’s video series on plotting your novel, and in the videos, she has a workbook that you can download for free to help you parse out the major chunks of your story. This was really helpful for me because it kept me from clumping things together or spacing them too far apart. To be clear, this isn’t a formulaic structure either. This is meant to be the bones upon which your story is built, but things can be moved around, skipped, etc.

I liked this method because while I don’t 100% adhere to the guidelines, it helps me figure out on an act-by-act basis what needs to happen, where I’m going, etc. At this point, I plan an act, write the act, and once I hit about 3/4 of the way through it, I start planning the next act of the book. This has helped me to have structure and foresight without ruining the discovery aspect of my writing. Sometimes I also have chunks of story in my head, but I can’t quite figure out where they go. This outline has helped me to solidify that before I make a mess for myself. If you haven’t already guessed, I do not like making a mess for myself and will avoid it at all costs, even if it means having three different outlining methods all at once.

Using Note/Scene Cards

Remember when I mentioned having scenes in your head but not knowing where to put them? Making note cards might be a solution for you. I like using physical note cards (as opposed to using a digital whiteboard or the features on Scrivener) because I’m a visual learning and being able to physically move, crumple, or alter a card just works better for me than a digital one. That, and I can’t get as easily distracted with them as I can with anything on the internet or a digital program. I am already easily distracted, and the moment I change windows, I’m a goner.

At this point, I don’t write out a card for every scene. I only do it for the major ones, whether that’s major for a side plot, main plot, character development, etc., but I don’t do it for every single scene. The purpose of them for me is to avoid forgetting something important. Sometimes I have ideas I want to add that I don’t know where to put, so they can’t be added to the main outline, but if I have them as a scene card, they hang out in the pile. Then, when I flip through the stack every once in a while, I see it and go, “Oh! Yes, I need to figure out where this goes.” Repeat that about twenty times for everything in the latter half of the book, and sometimes I actually figure out where it needs to go or at least what it needs to come before or after. That’s really what the cards are for, the general order.

For me, these tend to be scant, like “[REDACTED] turns up dead” or “Oliver runs into his ex.” You can obviously be as detailed as you need or use the front/back of the cards for different things. What I like to do is color code the cards by act. Act 1 is yellow, Act 2 Part 1 is green, Act 2 Part 2 is blue, Act 3 is purple, and the colors are represented as a stripe on the edge of the card or as a strip of washi tape. As I write the book, I put a little check in the bottom corner of the cards to mark that I wrote the scene. The cards help keep me organized while allowing me to move things around and plan as needed.

Other Things I Do That Help Me

• Edit as I go- I will give the caveat that I’m not editing for perfection. I’m just tidying up and beefing up the scenes I worked on the day before. Sometimes I go back and plant things that are needed to be cohesive (foreshadowing and such), so I don’t forget when I do edits weeks later.
• Edit on an act-by-act basis-once again, tidying and reacquainting myself with what I’ve already written to maintain cohesion and make sure I haven’t forgotten any threads.
• Have a running notepad document with random stuff I need to add or what should happen in the next scene/chapter I will be working on. If you have a brain like a sieve, leave yourself notes.
• Work on the assumption you will not remember an idea- my brain is like a browser with a hundred tabs open, so I leave myself notes, reminders, etc. for everything. Never assume you’ll remember because you won’t.