Plotters and Pantsers Revisited.

This is a revised version of a post from 2022, because the question of different writing processes has arisen again, this time on Facebook. The other night, we were debating whether children should be made to plan out their writing in advance - or just work it out as they went along. Opinion was, of course, divided. 

A friend inspired that original post and I'm grateful to her. She observed that she had been taken by surprise by the ending of one of my novels called Ice Dancing and my immediate thought was 'so was I!' I had no idea how it was going to end, until I started writing the last couple of chapters, and suddenly saw what should have been staring me in the face at the same time as the narrator herself discovered it. The odd thing was that it didn't involve any manipulation of the story. No careful plotting. No subtle planting of clues. No planning at all. When I looked back, the clues were all there. I just realised what had been happening at the same time as my narrator. 

Which in turn led me to think about a couple of other novels where the ending had taken me by surprise. Without any spoilers, in Bird of Passage, I discovered the trauma that the 'hero' (if he can be called that) Finn was trying to remember at about the same time that he realised it himself. Until that moment, all I knew was that there was something that he was struggling to remember, a memory that - as an act of self preservation - he had buried deep inside. As I wrote what turned out to be a pretty long book, I didn't have a clue what it was. It's a precarious position to find yourself in - but it's exciting. 

Then, towards the end of the process, I literally woke up in the middle of the night saying 'So that was what happened!' But I had never, not once, plotted it. 

Similarly, in The Physic Garden, I knew that the ending involved a shocking betrayal because that's how it begins. The narrator mentions it, without going into detail, so we, the readers, don't know what it is. Again, I realised the nature of that betrayal and its consequence much later on in the story. This time, the narrator knew what it was, but had been reluctant to write about it until he was ready to confront it, and in some sense heal the memory. 

I am what is known as a 'pantser'.. I write by the seat of my pants. I write to find out. I always know the beginning, and I sometimes have a very vague idea of the ending, sometimes as little as the last few lines - but I never know how to get there. 

If I did plot everything out in advance, I would get so bored that I would never finish writing the book at all. And it's no use telling me that 'lots of people do'. I know they do. But I don't. 

Outlines were always anathema to me, because I could write them (with difficulty) while knowing full well that the finished book or play would be nothing like the outline. How could it be when I just didn't know? Plotters need to know. They plan everything out meticulously, including detailed character sketches. I never do that either, because I've only just met these people so how can I? It doesn't feel precarious. It feels uncannily as though the story is already there, waiting to be uncovered.

All the same, for many writers, plotting works well. I don't write crime fiction or the kind of thrillers that depend upon intricate plots that must fit together but I know that they do need to be pretty well plotted in advance. Otherwise you might find yourself desperately trying to tie up too many loose ends in the last chapter. 

The problems arise when we try to enforce one method on people for whom it doesn't come naturally. There is no right or wrong way - only the way that works well for you. The trick, as with so much creative writing, is to find out what suits you best.

The Facebook debate was originally about children. It's certainly helpful to teach them about the basic structure of an essay (or 'composition' as it used to be called, in the olden days) and how to plan it out. I spent four years as Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow in a university, helping students to do just that: how to structure their academic writing, how to follow a line through an essay, how to frame an argument.

But where creative writing is concerned - stories, making things up, fiction  - I don't think it's nearly so important. In fact for children, it may inhibit them. 

Many years ago, I was asked to judge a local schools creative writing competition. When the prize-giving came around, it became clear that I had chosen the 'wrong' child. He had written a chaotic but gloriously imaginative tale that no teacher or parent had ever had a hand in. He was surprised and delighted to win but I sensed an air of disapproval in the room. The parents of the usual suspects, the kids who always win prizes, were not amused. The following year, I was presented with a small pre-selected set of pedestrian, perfectly planned and phrased stories, littered with unnecessary adjectives, fronted adverbials* and all.

I said I couldn't possibly judge them under these circumstances.

Later, when I was working as Royal Literary Fund Fellow, a student asked me to look at a drama script. This was unusual, because most of my work involved helping with academic essays and dissertations. It was a good piece of work. I pointed out a few things and then told her to 'go away and play with it.' She looked at me in dismay and said 'But we're not supposed to play with it. We're supposed to get it right!' 

It encapsulated everything that I find troubling about Creative Writing as an academic subject. No writer ever really believes they have got something right. The most you can hope for is 'good enough'. Or 'I'd better stop now'! The real joy of writing involves playing with the material, exploring, finding out, experimenting, drafting and polishing and cutting and polishing again, until the piece - more or less - says what you want it to say. 

If planning it out helps you, go for it. If it doesn't, don't worry about it. You don't have to 'get it right'. Only as good as you think it can be. 

* I have an honours degree in English Language and Literature, with a fair amount of Linguistics in the mix. I taught English as a Foreign Language for three years. I have never, not once, come across the term Fronted Adverbial. I still don't know what it is. Did Michael Gove make it up? 

How Not To Be A Writer - Part One: Childhood

 

Here's me with my plaits. My hair was so long that I could sit on it. Mum plaited it every day - I must have been one of the few kids in my school that didn't get head lice, probably because they couldn't get any purchase on the tight braids. 

I don't remember learning how to read and write. My school was a small Roman Catholic state primary, not particularly close to where we lived in Leeds. There were always books in our house, including a set of old Wonder Books that had belonged to my Aunt Nora, beautifully illustrated extracts from the classics, poems and short stories by the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen. I loved them, but I don't remember when I moved smoothly from having them read to me (along with little Noddy and The Faraway Tree) and being able to read them for myself.

We had a good, kindly infant teacher called Winifred Burgess, one of the very few teachers I remember with real affection, but I would always rather be at home than at school. The 'big girls' bullied us every playtime, pretending to balance us on the school wall, but in reality threatening to topple us over. Ever since my school days, I've marvelled at the naivety of adults about children and schools and the low key nastiness that went on, and I'm sure still does go on. 

My wish to be at home was granted in terms of a constant stream of childhood illnesses, interspersed with serious asthma, so I spent a lot of time at home, mostly in my nana and grandad's house, at 32 Whitehall Road, sitting on the rag rug in front of their fire, listening to their wireless, and reading. My parents started their married life in a tiny two roomed flat above their adjacent small shops - a sweet and tobacconist and my grandad's fishing tackle shop. When I was well enough, I would take myself along to his shop and sit with him in there, bothering him with questions that he never minded answering. He called me his little queen, in the old Yorkshire - nay, the old English - way. His 'little woman'.  I was very much loved and wanted for nothing, except perhaps a pair of patent leather ankle strap shoes, and I'm pretty sure I got those as well. Mum and dad took me to the 'pictures' - the Gainsborough in Holbeck - to see Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. Afterwards, I made the whole family reenact it, alongside all my toys, with myself in the starring role, of course. An early venture into theatre.

I don't remember learning how to read and write, but somehow I could and did. I listened to the wireless - Listen With Mother, then Children's Hour, and the terrifying excitement of Journey Into Space. I have another memory of what must have been an early dramatisation of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca and its haunting opening lines 'last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again' - so vivid that I can still see it in my mind's eye. We had no television, nor would have for years, so the words had created the pictures long before I was old enough to read the book. 

At some point, I must have thought 'I could do that'.  

I was right. I could and, some fifteen years later, I did. On the whole, it was a mistake. It was a wonderful medium, but once television came on the scene, BBC radio drama was the poor relation. The cheap option. Of which much more later in this story. The talent they had accumulated was prodigious, but they neither knew nor cared just how extraordinary. It did, however, teach me how to write dialogue, and how to visualise things when I wanted to write about them, how to orchestrate. For some years, it would earn me a living of sorts, and even a couple of awards. All that, though, was far in the future.

When I was twelve, we moved to Ayrshire in Scotland. I was an incomer. An interlowper. I was an awkward adolescent and my accent was all wrong. Good experience for a writer-in-training, but not very comfortable at the time. No wonder I retreated into my head. It was a time that I still think of as 'bullying and Burns'. Great experience for a would-be writer though. 

Tacit Knowledge and Creative Writing Workshops

Not-a-workshop in Grantown-on-Spey

 

I have regular Zoom chats with three friends, started before the pandemic as real life meetings, but continued online. All of them are professional artists. I'm the single writer, and it's always interesting and enlightening to compare the way I work with the way they work - although obviously they don't all work in the same way either. 

A few weeks ago we started talking about tacit knowledge and they asked me how that applied to my work. My first impulse was to say 'it doesn't.' But I've been thinking about it ever since, and of course it does. It's just that most writers either don't realise it, or feel uncomfortable acknowledging it. 

Most creative professionals don't retire but as time goes by, we tend to acknowledge what we do and don't want to do. We learn how to say a polite 'no'. Here's an awful admission. I've always disliked doing workshops. Worse, in all my years of actually delivering workshops, I've had an uneasy feeling that I don't know what a workshop is or should be. 

Nor do most of the people who ask you to do them. I've seen all kinds of events described as workshops from writers speaking about their books, how they researched and wrote them, to full on, participatory 'how to' sessions for a few people, which is more or less what I think of when I see the word. I still love doing the former, but the latter? Not so much. 

If you write non-fiction or historical fiction, you can give an entertaining and informative talk about your work and how you set about researching it. For example, I've enjoyed every talk I've given about The Jewel, my novel about Robert Burns's wife, Jean Armour, and I hope other people have too. This is partly because I'm comfortable with describing my research, but also because the audience for this kind of talk is usually knowledgeable, so they will ask interesting questions, and offer their own contributions. 

I've taught intermittently throughout my working life, three happy years teaching English as a foreign language to adults in Finland and Poland, numerous drama and script-writing workshops, radio workshops, and some hugely rewarding years as a Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow at our local university, helping students with their academic writing. 

I enjoyed the RLF fellowship most of all. In those one-to-one sessions I was using my tacit knowledge as an experienced writer (although I didn't call it that) to help students see their own way through. 

'How can you read my essay and immediately point out the main thread, when I'm floundering about?' one of my students asked me. It was down to years of practice. We never did the work for them. We just showed them a way of working things out for themselves. Mostly by asking the right questions. It's what good editors and producers do for writers too. They ask the right questions and in finding the answers, you make the work better yourself. 

That same tacit knowledge is what I use when I'm writing - for example - dialogue. I've had years of writing plays for radio and the stage, and now in fiction. But if I'm asked to do a workshop on writing dialogue I feel a sense of panic. I can do it. I know what works and what doesn't. But I don't know how to explain how I do it to people who don't have an ear for it. 

It's like when my woodcarver husband takes a block of lime and cuts off all the pieces that don't look like whatever he wants to make. He can teach people the basics. Teach them about wood and tools and techniques, but if they can't see the wonderful thing inside the wood, can't feel the shape of it, it will take more than a couple of workshops to acquire the feel for it that is the result of years of practice. It's the same with writing. I can give people rules for writing dialogue. I can frame exercises to help them. But there is no shortcut.

None of which is to denigrate the role of really good mentoring, done with a light touch. Somebody with lots of tacit knowledge helps us to find a way through our problems, often by questioning what we're not doing, rather than telling us what we ought to be doing. 

Intuition is a whole other can of worms. On the whole, I think the more you work at  your craft, whatever that is, the more intuition you will acquire. That way, your tacit knowledge becomes intuitive, so that you can look at a piece of work, get the feeling that something is wrong with it and often, but not always, fix it for yourself. 

Plotters and Pantsers - which one are you?

 

A friend inspired this post and I'm grateful to her. She observed that she had been taken by surprise by the ending of one of my novels called Ice Dancing and my immediate thought was 'so was I!' I honestly had no idea how it was going to end until I started writing the last couple of chapters, and suddenly saw what should have been staring me in the face at the same time as the narrator herself discovered it. The odd thing was that it didn't involve any manipulation of the story. When I looked back, the clues were all there. I didn't have to plant them at all. 

Which in turn led me to think about a couple of other novels where the ending had taken me by surprise. Without any spoilers, in Bird of Passage, I discovered the trauma that the 'hero' (if he can be called that) Finn was trying to remember at about the same time that he realised it himself. Until that moment, I knew there was something, but didn't know what it was. I literally woke up in the middle of the night saying 'So that was what happened!'

Similarly, in The Physic Garden, I knew that the ending involved a shocking betrayal - because that's how it begins. With the narrator mentioning it, without explaining it. Again, I realised the nature of that betrayal and its consequence only when I got to that part of the story. 

I am what I believe is known as a 'pantser' in creative writing circles. I write by the seat of my pants. Although that isn't how I'd ever describe it myself. I write to find out. I always know the beginning, and I sometimes have a very vague idea of the ending, sometimes as little as the last few lines - but I never know how to get there. And if I did, I would get so bored that I would never finish writing the book.  

Outlines were always anathema to me, because I could write them (with difficulty) while knowing full well that the finished book would be nothing like the outline. How could it be when I just didn't know? Plotters do seem to know. They plan everything out, including detailed character sketches. I never do that either, because I've only just met these people. It doesn't feel precarious. It feels uncannily as though the story is already there, waiting to be uncovered. 

All the same, for many writers, plotting works extremely well. I don't write crime fiction or the kind of thrillers that depend upon intricate plots that must fit together but I suspect they do need to be pretty well plotted in advance. Otherwise you might find yourself desperately trying to tie up too many loose ends in the last chapter. Or in the last episode, as happened with a recent, deeply annoying TV series. But it would be interesting to hear from crime writer friends if this is indeed the case, or if there's a sort of half way house where you have a broad outline that you flesh out as you're writing. 

There is, of course, no right or wrong way - only the way that works well for you. The trick, as with so much writing, is to find out what suits you best. And the only way to do that is to carry on writing. 

 

Writing Advice: Getting the Details Right

This isn't really a 'how to write' blog. But I've been writing in so many different media for so many years now, that occasionally things occur to me that may be useful for people who are just starting out on the long road to publication or production. I used to teach Creative Writing for various organisations, so I have a good idea of what works and what doesn't. For the New Year I've dug out my big folder of 'how to' notes and I'll be including an occasional post with what I hope may be useful advice. Some of it should be self evident - but isn't always. 

I've been reading a contemporary thriller. I won't name it, even though it's a very good read. It fairly gallops along with plenty of surprises along the way, although less than half way through, I've guessed at least part of the ending. That, though, is more my problem than the writer's. The more you write yourself, the more you tend to be able to guess what's going to happen next. 

No. The niggling irritation involved a garden. 

The story is set in spring (I think) a warm late spring, in the South of England. The house has a big garden. Early on, we're told that it is full of wild garlic and lavender. Now, although wild garlic flowers and scents the air with its wonderful pungency through the spring of the year, it tends to be found more in ancient woodlands, bluebell woods in particular, flowering from April to June after which it is masked by other growth. By May, the scent of bluebells usually takes over. Lavender stays green throughout the year in mild climates, so that's fine. Although it wouldn't be all mixed up with the garlic. Later though, that same day, we're told that the garden is miraculously full of flowers including foxgloves, night-scented stock, hyacinth? As any gardener, even the most amateur among us, knows, your foxgloves and night scented stock are summer flowers. Hyacinths? Not so much. Not even bluebells if that's what's meant. 

We all get details wrong. But it is this kind of precise detail that can pull the reader right out of the story, challenging her willing suspension of disbelief. On reflection, it's indicative of a wider problem, because I'm still not 100% sure at exactly what time of year the story is set. Sometimes it feels like summer but other details mean it must be spring. In which case, yay for the wild garlic and hyacinths. Not so much for the foxgloves and night scented stock.  

It shouldn't matter at all. But it sort of does. It irritates, because this is a much lauded traditionally published novel and it's exactly the kind of thing that a good editor should immediately pick up on, writing 'flowers? time of year?' in Track Changes. Then perhaps even extrapolating from that a question about timescales, the when of the story. That's what good editors do. They pick up on the small things with wider implications. They ask the right questions and in finding the answers, you, the writer, make the piece of work better. 

So much of writing involves finding exactly the right word. That goes for things as simple as garden flowers, as well as complex emotions. If you're not a gardener, then Google is your friend. 

 

No More Workshops

 

Book event in lovely Grantown-on-Spey

Let me say up front that I love doing book events. I enjoy speaking about my books, and my writing and the research that goes into them. I love doing readings, and answering questions about the work and explaining as best I can how I write. There are always lots of questions, and audiences at book events are usually interested and interesting people.

 

But what I don't like doing, even though I've done lots of them, more or less successfully, are writing workshops where emerging writers learn about some aspect of creative writing, such as story structure or character or dialogue. And lately, I've begun to try to analyse why I don't like doing it. 

I've done a fair bit of adult teaching in my time: English as a Foreign Language in Finland and Poland and more recently helping students with their academic writing, as a Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow. I loved all that Fellowship too - but it wasn't creative writing. It was far more about teaching young people how to structure an essay, how to choose the right words, how to say what they themselves wanted to say with clarity and simplicity. 

All of which, I hear you say, would be useful for creative writing too. And you would be right. 

I began my writing life as a poet, mutated into a playwright, but now work almost exclusively on fiction and non-fiction, which means that I could theoretically wear all kinds of workshop hats. In a sense, my career has been too varied for my own good. When I look back, I can see that I've always been faintly uncomfortable with the notion of a creative writing workshop. I was discussing this with an artist friend recently, both of us acknowledging that we've gone off the whole idea of teaching other people in our own disciplines  - although I have to stress that I do still enjoy the notion of 'sharing' how I work with people. 

Two little stories may help to explain this. One dates from many years ago when as a very young, aspiring writer I contacted a more experienced writer to ask for advice. 'The only way to learn how to write is to write' he said. Adding that it may seem a little harsh, (it did!) but it was the truth. The older I've grown, the more I've seen that he was right. You have to do it to do it.

The other story involves a conversation with a writer friend - a very successful one - who confessed that whenever he was asked about how he wrote, he realised that he 'just footered around for a while'. Footer or fouter is a good Scots word meaning fidget or fumble although like many words in another language that doesn't quite encompass it. Potter might be nearer the mark. Anyway - I just fouter around, he said, and do a bit here and a bit there, and quite suddenly, I look at it and there's a book. 

I identify with this. Which is not to say that - as time goes by and deadlines loom - I don't work very intensively indeed, because I do. Sometimes ten or twelve hours a day and waking in the night to think about it. I think we all do. And then spend days and weeks and months editing. 

Another example. I was once asked to do a workshop on writing dialogue. I've always been able to write dialogue - for radio, for theatre, and most certainly in novels. But when I sat down to plan a 'workshop' about it, I didn't have the foggiest notion about how I did it. Because what I really wanted to say was 'I just listen to what the characters are saying to me, and then I write it down'. Which is no help at all if somebody can't hear a word their characters are saying. 

It reminds me of whenever my woodcarver husband is asked how he goes about making something. He says that he looks at a piece of wood, and then cuts off everything that doesn't look like the idea in his head. 

Which is no help at all to impractical people like me - but it works just fine for him! 

Monkey, carved by Alan Lees for Kelburn Country Park 

Advice About Advice About Writing.

What to write? That is the question.

I had a sudden insight today: one that has been creeping up on me for some time, but that only resolved itself into a firm conviction this morning. So I'm going to share it with you, although I'm uneasily aware that I may be offering you advice about NOT taking advice about writing.

Nevertheless, I've been at this game for longer than most of the people I know, so I'm going ahead anyway.

How to write.
To be clear, advice about writing itself, how to do it, can be good, bad and indifferent and you have to tread warily because all too often, you only manage to distinguish between them afterwards. I've had all three. But most of us would agree that a good editor is a pearl of great price, and you want to cling fast to her when you find her.

Sometimes the very best advice comes in the shortest form.
Here are three pieces of advice I was given by more mature writers, quite early on in my career.
All of them have stayed with me, because each one was, in its own way, invaluable.

1 Read a lot.
2 The only way to learn how to write is to write.
3 Stop watering your Dylan Thomas adjectives and watching them grow.

You'll find something very similar to the first two in one of the best books about writing I've ever read: Stephen King's On Writing, a short memoir with a bit of advice on the side. It doesn't matter whether you appreciate King or not, by the way. The advice is just as valid. The first should be self evident, but isn't. It constantly amazes me just how many people I meet who say that they 'want to be a writer' but go on to say that they 'don't read very much.'

Even more astonishing is the number of people I meet, sometimes on writing courses, who don't actually do any writing, even though they also assert that they would love to be a writer. It's the equivalent of me saying I would love to win the lottery, but it's never going to happen, not so much because it's a statistical long shot as because I never buy a ticket.

The Dylan Thomas adjectives remark was probably the best of the lot. It wasn't a wholesale 'remove all descriptive words' piece of nonsense - it was a good way of saying, 'Cultivate your garden. Weed things out a bit' and I've remembered it for ever.

What to write.
So what about that sudden insight?
It makes my heart sink to reflect on it, but I offer it here for your consideration. While a good deal of the advice about writing that I've been given over the years has been helpful, none of the advice about what to write has done me any good at all. Never. Ever. Not even once.

It didn't stop people offering it though. Do this, do that. This will sell, that will sell. Don't write this play. Write that play. Don't take up that offer, take up this offer. People don't want this, they want that. Write this book, or this or this. Can you do this? Can't you do that?

None of it - when followed - has ever worked. None of it has ever earned me money or success or fulfillment. In fact the very people who advised me to do this or that or the other thing have invariably changed their minds later on, leaving me stranded.

All of which tells me that my own instincts were right all along. The books and plays that have been most successful have been written because they were my personal obsession. It would have been better - or at the very least no worse - if I had always just got on with writing exactly what I passionately wanted to write. Which, oddly enough, was the piece of advice given to me many years ago by my first and best literary agent, sadly no longer around.

Only write something if you can't bear not to write it, she told me.

Which is exactly what I plan to do from now on.