Craft Pathology: Pantser? Plotter? Paraphilia?

An Essay in Correspondence With Thaddeus Thomas' Literary Salon #4: Re-Imagined Plotter Tools

(I made this so long ago I it could probably drink, but the painter is amazing isn’t he?)

Craft Pathology: Pantser? Plotter? Paraphilia?

Hi, I’m Emil Ottoman and I’ll be playing the encyclopedic villain in today’s writing Craft Pathology report about “pantsers” and “plotters”

When The Kids Are Left in Charge/A Short History of Stupid Terms

In spite of their annoying mouthfeel and the fact that they sound vaguely like something an eight year old would include in a playground insult, “plotter” and “pantser” are legitimate words with etymological origins that go back at least a century for “pantser” and probably well into near antiquity in some form for “plotter.”

In modern writing advice and craft circles, as a false dichotomy (I’ll get to that) they first rose to prominence around the early ‘00s, surfacing on NaNoWriMo forums and message boards et al. later being consumed wholesale by the fanfic community, and eventually ending up the gristle of ten thousand very bad articles on the craft of writing. Hit up Reddit or just Google the terms by themselves to find functionally infinite content about this.

However, if you’re here, reading my words, you probably know what a “pantser” is in contextual relationship with a “plotter.”

I cannot explain to you how childish and infantilizing these terms sound even in my inner Fight Club Narrator monologue.

A short timeline:

• Pre-2000s: Terms like "planner" or "outliner" existed, but “pantser” wasn’t common. Shocking, I know.

• 2001–2005: The terms appear frequently in NaNoWriMo forums, which helped popularize and standardize their use in the broader writing world to the detriment of EVERY WRITER SINCE TO PICK UP A PEN.

• 2000s–2010s: They spread like Norovirus on a fucking cruise ship to writing blogs, craft books, and YouTube channels like Brandon Sanderson’s lectures, K.M. Weiland's blog (Helping Writers Become Authors, which I doubt it really has since her advice is so basic mids and normative to western Hollywood style arcs and conservative moralistic in focus because she’s made enough money she needs to continually regress to the mean. She’s a walking fucking beat sheet. If you want more theoretical weight go with Truby, Coyne, or McKee. If you want to go academic and hyper intellectualize it, I’m not even getting into that corpus.), and Reddit’s r/writing (a place you should never ever go.)

• The Eternal NOW: "Pantser vs. plotter" is now a near-ubiquitous shit binary in writing advice, often followed by the third hybrid category and possibly worst portmanteau ever: “plantser” (someone who does some of both).

I was blissfully ignoring these terms and had been for quite a while until last week

Thaddeus Thomas

, a man who I respect for his craft knowledge, brought them back to the fore of my mind, and thus into my mental picture, and thus into my obsessive mental focus. So, go here and read this:

Literary Salon #4

Thanks for the shout out on the community side at bottom of the newsletter, great optics, on point, 100% agreed. No need to clique up hard fam, this ain’t the dope sets, we can all eat. A rising tide lifts all boats, and it’s Substack Summer!(Substack Summer forever)

Substack Summer Forever Y’all.

As soon as I saw the title of the mains, I knew I was in for it.

“Re-imagined Plotter Tools

for Discovery Writers”

Yeah, I was about to be in for it. However props for using Discovery Writers instead of pantsers, as that is historically more correct and less insulting terminology.

Because I’m going to shock everyone reading this right now. Professionals do not use these terms. Sorry, professionals who aren’t trying to sell you pressed Italian seasoning and call it luscious full melt hash do not use these terms. Alright, now I’m the bad guy. But I also like to avoid HARD REDUCTIVE BINARIES, which is what these two terms sucking face in the same place are. A grossly reductive binary. You WILL see these terms plenty of places. Behold, a list:

• NaNoWriMo and similar events

• Self-pub communities

• Writing Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit

• Online craft workshops and coaching courses selling your charlatan horseshit or insulting your intelligence, often ran by names you’ve never heard of who regurgitate things you can source for free with a short search.

• Commercial genre communities (romance, SFF, thriller, external arch genres) where prolific output is possibly expected.

In these specific spaces the terms in question serve a tribal/motivational function. They help writers align with other writers who share their frustrations or success. And they can be useful for building community and framing advice, not deep literary critique. Certainly they exist in a space we here (if you’re reading this, I pray) are not excited to inhabit or move into. And I think they’re out of place coming from Thaddeus as well, but here we are (Key words RE: Thaddeus “not deep literary critique”)

You can go look up any author worth their salt and in spite of describing arcane methods of process from recursive revisions to intuitive first drafts to “excavating” a story, and you’ll never see these two terms. Tartt, Palahniuk, King, Saunders, etc. etc. etc. Nary one of the offending terms in fuckin’ sight.

The concept of using an outline to do my thinking is as beyond my mortal grasp as heaven's cloudborn shores, for I'll never be redeemed of my discovery-writer ways. In the past, that's led to a horrifically lengthy writing process, but I've learned to change how I view plotting techniques, transforming them from failures to tools by a simple reframing.

A plot is simply a list of events in a (hopefully) logical causal chain. That’s it.

A plot is a list of things that will go wrong, or change, or that will constrict you.

A plot in the sense that it is used in this binary terminology fuckfest will choke the life from your story because what began as descriptive slang has over the years (decades? My god, someone send help) slowly turned into prescriptive doctrine for some. And I applaud Thaddeus for what he’s trying to do here, but he’s nicer than I am about it.

This leads to a bunch of problems, including rigidity and brittle thought, tribalism (which leads to dismissing other labels, adherence to your self selected label when it has stopped working, and putting method ahead of what your story needs.) But, most importantly leads to shallow cognitive framing

“Reframe the purpose of the plot.”

- Thaddeus, proving my damn point

A (severely) informal and cursory search of what I can find lying around me, and on Google, in the last 45 minutes suggests that the most common entry points to story are heuristically in rough order character/ premise/situation>image/scene>and finally title or formal form¹ .

Many, nay dare I say MOST authors eventually use multiple entry points, as one usually leads to at least two more, which is fairly organic.

If you’ve ever had many published (capital P here, alright) friends/acquaintances/enemies you talk to often or actually hang out with you’re probably already used to these phrases:

• “Damn, that would make a great title.”

• “Damn, I wish I’d written that line.”

• “Damn, that’s a great line.”

• “I wonder…” (after this they may trail off.)

• “That was a great line/title/scene” (in reference to your work, their own work, or any other piece of narrative media.)

And then if you read enough writers talking about writing shit you’ll notice a pattern in that none of these people EVER say one of the two words I’m popping off on in this totally unnecessary essay, however I commend Thaddeus, even though his examples and use cases are slightly muddled in execution (but I get it, I have weapons grade ADHD and I just woke up and sat down like “I’m going to finish that fucking thing from last night.” I muddle execution a lot. Thaddeus is at least 50 times more organized than I am.) for trying to help people stuck in this pantser>plotter doom loop, and yes I’m going to call it a doom loop, get out of it.

“If you're not a plotter, but wish the plotter's tools were for you, stop thinking of them as plans you must follow. They are outlets through which all the half-formed ideas flow, allowing you to come to the final solution faster.”

- ibid (blatant misuse; ask a friend in a PhD program why)

So²³ I very much applaud and give plaudits to Thaddeus’ attempts to cognitively reframe the false binary that’s come to dominate so much informal and terminally online craft discourse, but in doing so he’s not only helping to cognitively reframe the problem and offer actionable solutions, he’s also keeping the false binary alive.

Which is why I’m writing a critique not so much of his attempt to help misguided souls, but I am here to lambast and murder the terms myself.

You learn your way in the process

- ibid

Thaddeus, you could have pointed out the false binary from conception, and used this as your starting point.

Because this REALLY IS the starting point.

Every story you’re writing has its own demands, there is no diagram (though trust me, you can painstakingly diagram any fictional narrative/non-narrative/anti-narrative on the planet and give it an overly complicated but very precise label. Thank you Story Grid (Book, not ancillary material, which turns it into formulaic bullshit, which is one thing the book says it is definitely not, but Youtube is really good at. Hey, gotta pay the bills though.)

“Gene Wolfe once wrote, ‘You never learn how to write a novel. You just learn how to write the novel that you're writing.’”

-ibid

Frontload this. This is the most important point to make. It’s right. Thaddeus goes on to illuminate for “plotters” the mind of a pantser/discovery writer as he sees it, along with some common bullshit assumptions that brittle thinking associated with this false dichotomy between “pantsing” and “plotting” leads to including that foreshadowing is something a “pantser” would have to go back and add in after the fact (bullshit) and that “plotters” say “pantsing” only works if you use your first draft as an outline (extra bullshit.)

While his points are good and salient they’re very much intrinsic to him, though broadly applicable, which is commendable. This isn’t a dig, I use this sort of example all the time. (It’s a thing people who have personalities and presence do if they have domain mastery over a subject. They move from the specific, often themselves or someone close to them, to the broad teeming masses of their audience. Wonderful device, keep it in your toolbox.)

I generally fall into the category of formal or informal experimentalism, but to start I most commonly have either a concept, a character, or sometimes one image, sometimes ONE SENTENCE, and I’ll build out from there.

If I think my concept needs some worldbuilding, I’ll do some worldbuilding.⁴

If I think it’s done in one draft (because I’m a systems and sentence level writer, which means I care about all my damn sentences and often write very tight first drafts) I will declare it done.⁵

I do not plot, I write stories. It is nice to have a contour, system, or vague topological view of the story I’m telling. But in general I find myself in long form (novella, novel etc.) after having an idea of what the general beginning, middle, and end may look like, find myself in the same camp as my friend Will Christopher Baer⁶ where usually while I’m writing I have an idea of where the next 30 or so pages MAY be going, especially if it’s coming to a point that I’ve decided beforehand is important or needs to be made in service to the story.

(Having said that Chris is a fantastic editor and freakish first pass wordsmith. When the muse is upon him he is a terrifying sight to behold. Likely part of the reason his diehard fans treat Kiss Me Judas (in particular? It’s a fantastic book, but it’s the first in a trilogy. The second book is actually my favorite, but I haven’t read them all in maybe 14-15 years) like the goddamn bible.)

Hardcore minimalists of the Lish school start with a “flight sentence” from which the entire story should logically flow from start to finish. This is why Lish’s brand of minimalism works so adroitly in short fiction. (Famously and apocryphally it’s in the mindspace that it can take Amy Hempel up to two weeks, yes weeks, to craft a single fucking sentence to her liking. Which, I’m not going to lie, I find impressive in strategic specificity, but would drive me out of my fucking mind.)

I think it would have done Thaddeus and the audience he’s writing to better considering the often detailed and technical and precise level of his craft dissections and essays much better to yank out the binary, point out the flaws, and get to the actual point as fast as possible.

You’re not a “pantser”. You’re not a “plotter”. You’re not a “plantser”⁷. You are a writer, storyteller, and author. I refuse to mince words by playing to that dilettante amateur hour bullshit. We’re not here to insult each others intelligence and I’m not here to label myself or anyone else as anything more than a writer, storyteller, and author. Past that, the method you use is the method you use, end of story.

“We are not the same, but we can learn from each other, just not in the ways you may expect.”

- ibid

Above is the single most important takeaway from the piece. And it’s not new. It is at core the concept of “take what you find useful and what works for you, and discard the rest.”

This is why I have enough book about writing to fill multiple bookcases, aside from maybe if I read some of the shitty ones I can tell people to avoid a book not worth picking up in the first place.

Conclusions

Thaddeus is a great student of the work of writing well. I wish he hadn’t invoked the terms in question. While I both understand why he may have, but disagree with letting those terms sit unmolested even as heuristic markers.⁸

The only interesting thing I found while writing this is the trivia I will abuse in the future that Cormac McCarthy envisioned No Country For Old Men as a screenplay before he conceived of it as a novel, therefore no one who likes the film more than the book is technically out of bounds for it.

In spite of my hatred for the terms, the essay (which I linked) is worth reading. I’m just here to register that it would do you better if you exist inside this binary, to huff some nitrous, fall over on your ass, and then get up and rise above it while your ears are still ringing and you’ll feel better for it.

I’d also remind you, these are casual and unserious terms. The faster you drop them the less like a dilettante or bush league wishyouwere⁹ you’re going to sound like. Do the work, finish the fucking draft,¹⁰ trust your process, keep good and diverse company, find your process, and don’t box yourself in with silly terms that create solid binaries (which the longer you adhere to, the harder the habits they form will be to break. Bad or otherwise. This is just neuroscience.¹¹)

Now go forth and rise to the level of your actual competence.

Or comment and tell me to fuck off.

Also feel free to share this post so that together, we can fight this creeping poison

Supplemental

Go Buy

Tom Schecter

’s book

Seriously, I took a break from finishing this monstrosity just to go see a live he was part of. I don’t often like “fantasy”, and I put off reading his work for months because I was scared of loving him to death as a person but disliking his writing.¹²

To say when I started reading the prelude to the Shieldbreaker Saga, Daughters of Vei I was incredibly pleasantly shocked would be an understatement. I’ve reviewed the verisimilitude of the violence in the book. I could write an entire longform essay on what narratively makes it exceptional among the genre it’s lumped with, just trust me, check it out. (Also subscribe to him, he’s going places.)

Burnt-Tongue Announces Its Second Workshop

Hidden way down here at the bottom I’m going to announce early and in brief.

I managed to bring

Craig Clevenger

back to the bully pulpit to bring a new group of writers into the fold of his hyper effective teaching of the craft. (His workshops are legendary in many circles for a damn good reason.)

Having brought you the nuts and bolts, the Writer’s Workbench, I present to you the soul and the spirit, the philosophy, and the horrific rapture of the work:

1. This was once revealed to me in a dream.

2. I’m always going to use pull quotes because I find the look of block quotes in a text to be vulgar. They assault my aesthetic sensibilities.

3. ibid, if you don’t know is most commonly used in foot/endnotes to denote something coming from the same source as the previous note. Labeling a pull quote “ibid” is basically skullfucking the concept. But this is writing, and I’m creative, so I’ll do what I want.

4. As in here: The Secret History of The World which is really just semi-narrativized worldbuilding for a novel I recently took back down off the shelf.

5. Floridecay I finished in one draft and two hours, it was sold for pub an hour after I finished it. Anyone who tells you your first draft can only work as an outline has no idea what the fuck they’re talking about. Pay them no attention and enjoy your lunch.

6.

will christopher baer

from personal conversation.

7. I swear to god, if I could physically kill a word, this would be one of them.

8. The terms deserve to be molested.

9. I prefer straight compounding to hyphen fucking, deal with it. As my friend WCB has said and as I agree with, “fuck that hyphen.” This is what you call a stylistic choice. Prescriptive orthodox grammar would tell me this must be hyphenated as an action of the compounding. I’m a descriptive linguist and grammarian and also an artist. Did you get the signal? Was it overly confusing without the hyphens? (I could see this for some people actually.) The point is, the point still gets across.

10. Without the draft, you have nothing. Doesn’t matter if it’s first, last, or only. Without the draft you don’t have shit.

11. Armstrong, Gottschall, Storr, Boyd, and Rosenbaum if you have cash and you’re into hyperacademics. Oh, why not Squire et al, and Kendall et al.

12. A worst case scenario for writers who are friends