Plot or Pants? How about a New Question!

Let’s put a moratorium on the “plot or pants” debate.

Because here is how every plot/pants article goes: Should you plot or pants? Plotting is knowing where your story is going. Pantsing is just making it up as you go along. Plotting makes your story feel whole. Pantsing gives your story life. You should use both!

And the reader will never get the minutes spent getting that vapid advice back. What’s rule number 1 for writing? Right. Respect the audience. Don’t waste my time.

When you get a bad answer, it’s because you have a bad question. There is something worthwhile in thinking about the plot/pants dichotomy, but it’s not in deciding to be a plotter or a panster. It’s in talking about the role of pre-writing and character life.

First off, if you’re not pre-writing—whatever your genre—you’re doing it wrong. This is pretty close to non-negotiable. There’s quite a bit of latitude in how you do that, though. Liza does a lot more and a lot more organized than I do. (Liza likes intricate plots and I like character interaction, so this is unsurprising. Oh, and this is not to say she neglects characters or I plot.) I tend to know highlights and am a lot more surprised on how we get there.

And there are stories and arcs I do more pre-writing for. I have a time travel sub-plot in the novel I’m working on. You can bet my pants I plotted that meticulously. I use Novikov’s principle, the idea that consequence can be its own cause, so there’s no flying by the seat of my pants in plotting that. How my characters fill in the details?

Love it or hate it, good characters are people in their own right. Once I give them goals, dreams, ambitions, and a world…they do what they please. Sometimes to infuriating effect. I created a throwaway character for my novel who just wouldn’t stop becoming a main character. This was messing with future plot, especially once he started dating my lead.

So I went to kill him.

Turned out my other characters had a silly emotional attachment and saved his life. Fortunately the character who wanted him dead was not a worthless villain and still effectively removed him from the story. He’s still a plot liability for me in the future—he might find a way back to my protagonists—but for the time being most of my problems are solved.

So the real question all this pants/plot writing should be addressing is what kind of problems do each approach solve? I can hardly hope to answer that in a single post, but you’ve probably got a feeling from what I’ve said.

Got a problem with the shape of the story? Plot. If you need forward motion or to iron out an inconsistency, make an outline. Invent goals and challenges to entice and push against your characters.

Got a problem with the people of the story? Pants. Let your characters react to the structure you’ve given them. Characters write stories, you just pick what parts of the whole to tell the audience. If they won’t go with the structure, let them smash things now before you write a stilted story with resentful people in your head. You might have to re-plot for them, but to be honest I’m always suspicious when my characters take all my plotting to heart.

Because if we’ve learned anything from spinning our wheels on the pants/plot debate it’s that they’re two halves of a whole. It’s time we talked about what that means.