A couple of thinks on the cheap have occurred to me over the past few days.
Ted (shredtedbob) has this writing collective kind of thing happening over at Discord. I helped him set up the server and offer an additional light moderating hand on the conversations. Which, it seems, it probably not needed at all because of the kind of folks he’s gathered to work on his scheme for cross-promoting a work or series of works. It’s a cool idea and similar to something I’ve tried to do in the distant past.
As I sat down and put on my “contributor” hat after taking off the “owner” hat, I quickly realized that some of my writing habits and goals have changed over the years. Under the gun, I realized that I’ve really, truly gone over and become a complete “pantster” writer. A pantster, for those of you unfamiliar with the term, is someone who does almost no planning when they sit down to write something. No plot, no problem. For a pantster, having crib notes and a general outline are the most they will put into their writing by way of planning. They tend not to mind the editing phase quite as much, because there are of course going to be things that need fixing after the story is done. The pantster is on the opposite end of the big stick from a planner, who tends to plan out most of the story before writing it and usually has well-developed notes and an outline. They tend to not need to have much editing, because most writers are somewhere between the two extremes.
While I have tried out approaches all along the continuum, I have become increasingly “fly by the seat of my pants” with my writing. I might be wrong in my assessment, but I get most frustrated with my output when things don’t follow the outline I’ve worked hard to develop and a story takes on a mind of its own. Which, honestly, happens more often than not. What I do is more of a “channeling” of story than I am the conductor of an orchestra.
Plus, I have been enamoured with writing shorter, rather than longer prose for at least 25 years. I used to think the epic novel was the paragon of writing, but I’ve been convinced that brevity is sometimes better than expansiveness. And, because I have a difficulty with planning too much (all that work is for naught when I sit down to write), I find myself freezing up when I am asked to write something lengthier and polished for future publication. That sounds like work.
I promised another useless and unimportant bit of thought: I have come to the realization that I tend to write absurdist, fantastic and weird fiction (as in Weird Stories, the defunct fiction magazine from the mid-1900s). My stories all seem to contain at least just a small amount of fantasy or the weird. It mostly is not part of the plan when I sit down to write to include those elements — it just happens that way. And I tend to leave folks with more questions at the end than resolutions. I’m not sure why I feel that is needed in most of these stories. It’s probably a bad habit that I should break. The pantster in me shrugs and notes that is someone else’s problem.
I probably should think harder about my contribution instead of rambling about such things, shouldn’t I?
Your homework:
Where do you fit on the continuum? Pantster — Planster — Planner
What subgenre do you consider your writing to be? Or do you strictly write literature?
Yeah, that’s all folks. Back to the grind. Extra points: Let me know below if you have any good story ideas I can riff off of.
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