Episode 025 | Outlining Systems

This week we’re going to address outlining systems (AKA plotting systems AKA planning systems), but first I need to talk to you about a few common terms tossed around in the writing community: pantser, planner (or plotter), and plantser (or plotter).



Now at the beginning of this episode, when I mentioned outlining systems, my guess is that some of you just felt a little flutter of excitement in your heart, while others might’ve felt a cold wave of panic wash over you. Lean into these feelings, people! They’re telling you something important about yourself.



For those of you who got excited, you might identify as more of a planner (or plotter). You like to know a lot about where your story is going before you sit down to write. You may not take it as far as James Patterson famously does with his outlines that go on for dozens and dozens of pages, but you feel more comfortable writing, have more fun writing, in fact, when you have guideposts to follow.



Pantsers, you panicked when you heard we were talking about planning. Or maybe most pantsers saw the topic and moved on their merry way, putting some distance between themselves and this week’s topic. Pantsers like the surprise of writing, They like to sit down with a basic idea or question, perhaps a flash of an imagined scene or character and then just follow the story where it takes them. Stephen King is a big pantser. In his seminal book On Writing: 10th Anniversary Edition: A Memoir of the Craft, he talks pretty extensively about it, in fact.



People have finally come to terms with the fact that this isn’t a binary condition, but instead a continuum. There are lots and lots of “plantsers“ (or “plotsers,” if you prefer) among us. In fact, few of us fall into the outer ranges of pure pantsers or planners. Most of us live somewhere in between the two writing extremes.



So which are you? How can you find out? You can’t necessarily base it on how you respond to other situations. Your affinity or aversion to structure in your daily life may or may not carry forward into your writing life. We’re complicated creatures and sometimes we simply don’t make sense.



For instance, In my twenties I had a friend from work come over for the first time. She’d only seen me at work, where I kept my desk super organized and my workflow streamlined. Not so much at my apartment. She just kept saying, “How are you the same person?”



In Judy Blume‘s Master Class (and I may have told this already, but if so, here we go again!), she talks about how her agent had a similar reaction when he went into her writing space for the first time. The rest of her house was reasonably orderly, whereas the office where she wrote most of the time looked as if a hurricane had blown through. It was how she felt most comfortable writing and she leaned into it.



You may be the kind of person who alphabetizes your spice rack and still not be a planner/plotter/outliner, but instead prefer to fly by the seat of your pants when you’re writing.



Like me, you may not know where your car keys and phone are half th...