Have you heard of Plotters and Pantsers? Well, I’m a Pantser, with a touch of Plotter. A Pantser is a writer who flies by the seat of their pants, just sits down and writes without much detailed planning. A Plotter is a writer who plans out their novel before they start writing it. Most people fit more into one category, but really both processes take place during the writing of a novel.

For example if you’re a Pantser, you normally have at least a vague idea of where you’re going before you start. With my current novel, I was driving home from a writing conference when the concept came to me. I imagined the storyline, and made a storyboard with pictures that I cut from magazines and pasted along a timeline, to help me see where the story was going. So you might call this some minimal planning, but when I started the novel, I just sat down and wrote, unsure of where it would take me.

Now that I’m nearing the end of the book, I’m starting to look at what’s missing and am beginning to weave bits and pieces back into the writing. Last week I decided to make changes to the first chapter, so I went back and edited and edited and edited. Now I need to make adjustments throughout the book. It’s the first draft, so it’s simply part of the process. I worked this way when I wrote my memoir too. Of course I had a basic understanding of what was going to happen in the story, it was a memoir after all, but there were a lot of different directions that I could have gone, so it took a lot of writing and editing and reworking to get the story the way I wanted it.

When I’m […]