2015 marked my eleventh year as a professional writer.  2004 was when I first began getting paid for my writing.  But like all writers I know, I’m continuing to grow in both my command of my craft and in my understanding of it.  And this year I gained an understanding of how my writing process works that I hadn’t had before.

True confession time:  I’m a seat of the pants writer/pantser/ organic writer.  One of those writers who doesn’t draw up a written outline for writing anything, even lengthy novels.

I find that a lot of readers don’t understand what the seat of the pants approach is all about.  Since it’s usually contrasted with the outlining approach, many just assume that the seat of the pants approach means just throwing words together almost at random, much as a painter might throw splatters of paint at a canvas, in the hopes that he or she will end up with a story instead of a mess.  Nothing could be farther from the truth.

The fact is, seat of the pants writers do outline.  They just outline in a very different method than organized outliners do.  And I knew this.  I just couldn’t articulate it very well.  Then I listened to a two-part interview with authors Lois McMaster Bujold, Wen Spencer, and Brendan DuBois on the Baen Free Radio Hour podcast (September 11 and September 15 2015 episodes) on the subject of creativity.  Listening to those fine authors discuss the subject caused my understanding of my own creative process to come into focus, and it definitely helped me shape what follows.

Keeping in mind that there is no one right way to write—they’re all good as long as they produce good stories and novels—I’m going to give you a look at how I approach working a writing project.

Just about all writers I know will admit to having some sort of internal guide for how they approach the craft.  Depending on who you talk to, it might be referred to as “the muse”, or “the back of the brain”, or “the writer sense”, or “the unconscious mind”, or “the writer perception”.  I’m sure there are other labels out there, but those are the ones I’ve heard the most.  Personally, since I tend to personify things, I refer to it as “the muse”.  (Don’t ask me what I call my laptop sometimes.)  I’ll carry that phrase forward now.

The first thing that the muse brings to me is the main character, or sometimes the main character set.  I’m not going to call my writing “character driven”, but every story I’ve written, no matter the length, began with the characters arriving in my mind.  Then I spend some time, anywhere from a couple of hours to a couple of weeks musing on the characters.  (Pun intentional.)  This is who the story is about.

The next thing the muse delivers is the situation/problem/conflict that is going to be the driving force behind the story.  And I spend some time meditating on that, on the ins and outs of the issues, and how they will impact the characters and the story.  The situation also usually defines where the story is going to start.  This is what the story is about.

Mind you, this kind of thinking is not done in dedicated blocks of time, but rather is tucked away in the back of the mind to kind of roll around while I’m at the day job or doing family stuff.  Every once in a while a thought will rise to the top and I’ll go, “Okay, that’s cool,” and add it to the mental file I’m building about the work.

The last major piece that the muse delivers is the ending.  This is critical to me in how I work:  I can’t start writing until I know how the story will end.  This is where the story is going to go.

If the story is a shorter work, that’s all I need to get started.  If it’s headed for novella or novel length, I may have identified a milestone or two that I want to include in the path of the story.  But characters, situation, and ending—the who, what, and where—always delivered in that sequence—are the pieces I personally have to have in order to begin writing.

So far, the process probably isn’t very different from how outlining writers work.  Things diverge now, though.

Let’s use the metaphor of driving from Cincinnati, Ohio, to Miami, Florida.

The outlining writer will plot a course from Cincinnati, identifying the exact roads to be taken, the places to change from one road to another, where to stop for the night, and perhaps even where to stop for meals.  And the story that will be written from that outline will flow in exactly that manner.

I, on the other hand, being the enterprising seat of the pants writer, simply begin writing.  I don’t have an outline on paper, but I do have the bones of an outline in my mind—beginning, milestones, and ending—and a destination fixed in place.  At this point, my muse begins operating like a good GPS.  She (I told you I personify things) points me in the direction of the goal and kicks me into gear and I head off down the highway toward Miami.  But somewhere along the way, I decide to take an exit and go see what’s happening over near some little village.  And my muse, like any good GPS, recalculates while I’m checking out what I wanted to see, and rather than try to take me back the way I came, tells me the new direction I need to go to get back on track and get to Miami.  And no matter how many diversions I make, how many bakeries and amusement parks and historical sites I go see, nothing gets outside the reach of my muse/GPS, and she will infallibly deliver me to Miami and the conclusion of my project.

So the outlining writer and I, we both arrive at Miami; he by way of his carefully plotted out roadmap/outline, and I by way of my muse/GPS.  Yes, the roads thus traveled are different, and the sights seen and described are very different, but in both projects we arrived at the end.

As a seat of the pants writer, it’s not true that I don’t have an outline.  I do have an outline; it’s just the barest hint of an outline residing between my ears, but when matched up with my-muse-the-writerly-GPS, it gets me to the end of the story.

So I think I’m going to quit calling myself a seat of the pants writer, and instead start calling myself a GPS writer.  What do you think?

David Carrico Bio:
David Carrico has been an avid science-fiction and fantasy reader since January 1963, when he encountered a copy of Andre Norton’s novel Catseye.  He started writing (mumbledy) years ago, but has been selling professionally since 2004.  Most of his work is alternate history.  His first book, an e-book entitled 1635: Music and Murder, was published by Baen Books in September, 2013.  It’s a collection of two different groups of stories which collectively provide the backstory for his second book, 1636: The Devil’s Opera, a novel published by Baen Books in October, 2013, in both paper and e-book formats.  Both books are laid in Eric Flint’s Ring of Fire alternate history universe, and the novel was co-written with Eric.
David is married, has three kids, five grandkids, two great-grandkids, and usually has at least a couple of Basset hounds lazing around the house somewhere.

When I was younger and less experienced, the joy of writing came from
building worlds and characters, then diving headlong into the story.
Full steam ahead and damn the consequences! Don’t get me wrong, I would
have a general idea of the plot in advance, but I was in no way married
to it. Or engaged. We were kind of dating, but really we were just
friends. As writing strategies went, it was loads of fun. Not terribly
effective, but fun.

As a not-so-surprising consequence, my writing suffered from all the
same problems that discovery writers typically face. Drafting took
forever as I would too often follow random bursts of “inspiration” down
a dead end path. I wasted scores of hours hunting down the perfect
moment for the finer corrections needed to justify and foreshadow an
ever evolving plot line. That’s not even touching the large scale
structural edits my meandering style necessitated. When combined with my
writer’s ADD, I’ve left many partially complete and messy manuscripts in
my wake. Looking back, I may choose to salvage a few of those worlds,
but probably scrap the prose and start again. It’d be easier than going
back and editing the mess into something publishable.

Discovery writing worked fine when I was a hobbyist. I was having fun,
and that was all that mattered. However, as I started considering a
writing career seriously, I recognized that I needed to change my ways
if I had any hope of making a living at writing. Most publishers and
readers don’t have the patience to wait years between manuscripts. I
needed to become more efficient at taking a novel from concept to a
completed work. Additionally, I needed to become more consistent with
the quality of my early drafts and more intricate with my plots. All of
which is really hard to do on the fly. As much as I hated to admit it, I
needed to outline.

It took a while to convince myself that outlining wouldn’t ruin all the
fun, but once I had, I began searching the Internet and my local
bookstores for advice. Published authors who had something to say about
outlining seemed to focus on story structure rather than the actual,
mechanical process of representing my thoughts and plans on paper. When
I reached out to my friends in the writing community, most everyone
seemed baffled by my questions. What do you mean you don’t know how to
outline? You just do it, right? Eventually I grew so embarrassed and
self-conscious that I stopped asking and started experimenting.

It took a while and many failed attempts, but eventually I ended up
settling on a graphical approach. Being an engineer by training and
trade, I was used to analyzing graphs and charts quickly. By plotting
story intensity versus time in story, I literally drew the shape of my
novel and labeled the scenes, reversals, twists, and foreshadowing. In
so doing, I was able to easily see the points where the action would
become overwhelming, or the narrative too slow to drive reader interest.
With a little tinkering and a comprehensive symbolic guide, I soon was
able to simply and clearly express complex thoughts and relationships of
tension and structure.

It worked well, but the results felt… mechanical. My plots were
technically sound, but I was missing something crucial to the very
nature of story. I understood the lack on an instinctive level, but
couldn’t put words to the feeling. It wasn’t until I sat down and read
through David Farland’s Million Dollar Outlines that I figured out what
I was missing.

While my discovery written works were erratic and often flawed, they did
have one very important thing going for them. They were passionate,
driven by emotion. When I tried to refine my structure, I was treating
my work like a science, not an art.

Farland’s book taught me that readers are fundamentally seeking an
emotional experience. They want to feel the heart pounding thrill of
overthrowing an empire or the sweet poignancy of a passionate first
kiss. Reading is an emotional exercise, a place in which they can
practice facing the world while still safe from the consequences of
defying totalitarian governments or risking one’s heart with potential
rejection. If your work doesn’t grab your readers’ heart strings and
pull, they won’t feel the satisfaction of a story well told. No matter
how technically sound your work is, Farland argued, you can’t forget the
importance of a balanced and powerful emotional journey.

So, I sat down and created a color code for all the emotional beats I
could think of, eventually refining the list down to ten key emotions. I
then began coloring in the symbols I had been using for my graphs. My
plot’s problem points began to pop out to me almost immediately.

I was planning a science fiction spy thriller, so I needed both drama
and action/adventure beats to support the story. However, I had decided
early on to focus on the adventure plot in order to help me maintain the
thriller pacing. And yet, I had planned to start with a drama beat.
Well, that wouldn’t do, so I rearranged the early plot structure to pull
the adventure and wonder forward while pushing the drama and mystery
back a bit deeper. Furthermore, there were several places where the
story descended into drama for a time, without a drop of action to be
found. I needed those sections to support later events, but was able to
add a few carefully chosen explosions and fight scenes to carry the
tension and pacing.

Perhaps the biggest problem yet, the climax was the wrong sort of
emotional payoff for the story as planned. Not completely broken, but
half wrong. What I really had was two plot lines that I was trying to
shoehorn into a single climax. By splitting them up and resolving the
subservient plot line with an appropriately emotionally satisfying
climax in the big middle, I was able to do both stories the justice they
deserved. I sat back and examined my plans. The plot wasn’t perfect, but
it was much better. Balanced. Good enough for me to start writing and
iron out some of the details in-situ.

I don’t think I’ll ever be the sort of writer who creates a 200 page
outline. That style is too rigid for my tastes. Even though I’ve been
spending a lot more time preplanning recently, I still do have faith in
the emotionally driven mad-man who loves to dive into the trenches and
set things on fire. I just have a more logical and deliberate part of me
in charge of keeping the other guy from wandering off after a shiny new
idea. In the end, I believe both aspects will be essential to my
writing. The trick will just be finding the optimal balance between the
two. David Farland’s Million Dollar Outlines was what I needed for the
technical side of my brain to understand what my passionate self knew
all too well. You can’t just outline the plot, you must also work out
how you intend to grab your readers by the heart strings and pull.