No, I am not out to change your writing tendencies! And may the different writing styles, from plotting to pantsing to everything in between live on! However, I still maintain that even pantsers can reap the benefits of a good plan without affecting their let’s-dive-in-and-go-for-it groove. The trick is…to plan in reverse. (Plotters stay with me – I’ve got you covered, too!)
How to plan a story in reverse
Pantsers: Have you ever experienced inner turmoil when it comes to writing workshops or those writing guides on bookstore shelves? It’s not that you don’t want to learn more about writing and grow as a writer, of course you do! It’s just that you love to wing it and fly through your drafts, following the twists and turns your imagination presents, enjoying the ride and what comes of it. For you, drafting is about discovery, and you don’t want to let an overly intricate plan stifle your imagination.
I am not a pantser, but I respect and admire this approach. If it’s working for you and bringing you joy as a writer, I am thoroughly happy for you!
However, in case you’ve never thought of it, I wanted to point out that you can still benefit from all that expert advice and even those writing guides. Instead of using them to figure out your story start to finish before you get going, use them to assess your draft once it’s complete.
For instance, perhaps you don’t spend time sketching out your characters before you get going on Chapter One. You discover them and bring them to life as you write. Fantastic! But once your draft is written, you know you have some revision and clarifying work ahead of you. To reflect on how well your fictional beings are coming across in your story, try using some plotter-and-planner tricks as a way to assess how effectively characters are coming across in your manuscript. As you read your draft, make character webs based only on what you show and tell about your character in your narrative. Write out a lists of traits, again, only as they come across in your draft (remember: you’re assessing your draft, noting down what a reader would see, not the unseen/unexpressed thoughts in your head). Can you sketch out brief biographies, or write up little backstory docs based on what your story has revealed? These reverse planning tactics and others like them can show you what’s showing – and what’s not – in your draft as it stands. And this tells you what your next tasks are during the revision stage.
You can do the same thing with planning strategies you might come across for world building and developing story settings. You might not want to fuss with them before you draft, but they can help you to gauge how alive your world appears in your current story ( whether it’s a fantasy realm or the world of a contemporary suburban neighborhood). Based only on what appears in your current text, can you now create a descriptive document, or draw a map, or answer a list of important world-related questions? Have you included everything you want your readers to see and experience in your draft as it stands? Again, employing “reverse planning” may reveal what so far lives only in your head and what needs to come out onto the page when you update your draft.
Another reverse planning/assessment technique that I love to use is something I call “taking a story inventory”. Simply put, you take a stack of index cards and as you read through your draft, note each beat or scene you come across on a different card. When you’re done, spread them out on a table in order. It’s now much easier to sweep your gaze over this tactile list. It will help you to spot holes, lapses in logic, or action that drags. You can move the cards around, add, delete and rearrange details until it flows – and then you can weave everything together in your updated draft.
Plotters: I myself have used the “take a story inventory” strategy both before and after writing a single draft, in other words: first as a planning tool, then as an assessment tool! Inevitably, changes happen when you go from planning to drafting (and that’s great). So, taking a story inventory of a draft, even if I’ve planned it out beforehand, helps me to see what has come through in the draft version, and what still needs work.
These are all ways that I’ve actually used reversed planning in my own writing and in my workshops. I’m not an expert on every single planning and plotting strategy out there and haven’t tried all of them – but I would venture a guess that you can probably adapt most of them into story assessment tools, too. Experiment and see what helps you to gauge the effectiveness, completeness and other aspects of your finished first draft.
Whether you only use these tools after writing your draft like a pantser might, or you use planning tools both to plan and again to assess, they can really help you to get honest with what’s actually in your draft, and where it needs to go next.