Plotting and the pain of pantsing novels
I’m an unabashed pantser. But… pantsing tends to be painful. In my first few years of writing fiction, I cringed away from plotting like a vampire shies away from garlic. That meant that I gave up on a lot of novels.
Fast forward a decade. My business book editor at Prentice Hall offered me a couple of fiction ghostwriting gigs. “You can do it,” he assured me. “Of course you can. You’ve published fiction.”
I couldn’t respond by sniveling — “yes, but I don’t know how to plot!”
So I had to teach myself an easy way to plot. I needed a simple and fun strategy, which combined plotting and pantsing.
