To Plot or Not

Writer nerd struggling with a plot on a hot Saturday afternoon, watching YouTube videos on plotting and discovering I am not the only one out there who attempts to write a novel without a fully formed plot. I learn that there is a term for this: pantser, as in flying by the seat of your pants.

I once heard an interview with author Joyce Carol Oates who said writing a novel without a plot was like driving a car without having any idea of where you’re going. On the other hand, writer Elizabeth Strout never writes a book from start to finish, instead writing scenes and letting the connections emerge as she goes. There’s something to be said for both plotting and following what’s emerging with only a glimpse of a plan. But in both life and fiction, the unexpected occurs, shifting the course no matter how much we would like to direct it.

If you’re a pantser in your chosen art form, are you also in life? In college I thought I would marry a lawyer, have three children, host fabulous dinner parties and write greeting cards for Hallmark. Alas… My life turned out about as 180 from that as it gets. I cannot reorder and reshuffle the scenes of my life. Perhaps that is the draw to fiction where I can pretend to have divine rule.

Plot or not, I might show up ready to write one scene for my character, and he or she walks stage right, and says, no, s/he would like to do something else entirely. I don’t have to heed. I mean this is fiction, right, and I’m the one in control, right? This rogue move could yield threads of gold; however, it could also lead nowhere. You don’t always know until you go there.

So, to plot or not? Is there a right or wrong choice? No, of course not. That would defy creativity, and fidelity and surrender to creativity is a big YES to whatever you believe, to whatever you might be plotting… or not.