Wednesday, June 9, 2010

WiP Wednesday: By the Seat of Your Pants


You may know me as a plotter. I've said on many occasions that I'm an out-liner, a notebook scrawler, and avidly anti-pants. Writing by the seat of your pants that is. But now that I'm 10K into the sequel to Evangeline, I realized something. I don't actually know how it ends.

Holy Frijoles! (mmm, frijoles *drool*)

This is a big deal for me, just so you know. I usually don't even start typing up a story until I've figured out all the main plot points, including at least an inkling of how it's going to end. I'm starting to surprise myself as I type up the story by adding twists that I haven't actually thought out on paper yet. But are my fingers writing a check that my brain can't cash? How will we get our heroes out of trouble?

For those of you who Pants, how do you do it? How do you drop your character into deep doo-doo without knowing how they're going to get out of it? Hopefully in a way that's meaningful to the story, right? Do you just keep writing, hoping, sweating, swearing, praying that the loose ends will come together?

Take pity on me, Pantsers. I need HELP!!

3 comments:

Abby Annis said...

The biggest thing about being a pantser is you have to be willing to cut large portions (sometimes the whole ms ☺) when your tangent doesn't work out. It's cool some of the stuff you can come up with out of the blue, but it doesn't always come together the way you want it to. This is why I wish I could outline. Did that help? ;)

Jennifer Shirk said...

I'm more of an outliner--even if I don't always follow my outline perfectly. :)

I'm always in awe when people just sit down and begin writing just like that.

Chelly Writes said...

I wish I could outline. I guess I'm just not that organized. I've found that I usually figure out the ending mid-way through an ms, but sometimes it changes. When I get stuck, I sleep on it and something always comes to me. And I edit. A lot. :)