One of the writers in the Taming Your Novel workshop I gave at York has - to my delight - picked up in her blog on something that I've recently come to believe: that the division that we often talk about, between Planners and Pantsers, is not necessarily a helpful distinction. And yet it comes up time and again, in everything from writers' forums to festival panel sessions: are you a planner or a pantser?
As I described it here, which you are is driven by your fears as much as your understanding. "Pantser" describes
... "flying by the seat of your pants": the kind of writer who dives straight into the first draft, and sees what happens. And the opposite seem to be the planners: the ones who don't start until they know a good deal about where they're going. The planners are afraid of getting lost or stalling or going wrong if they don't have at least some kind of map in their hand; the pansters are afraid of being shackled or bored or going wrong if they do. And yes, both can go wrong, and I've seen the results: the planned novel where everything fits together as neatly as a jigsaw, and is just about as interesting and believable an evocation of real life; the pantsed novel whose open-ended exploration of characters' lives and experience seems... well, endless.
But since I wrote that, it's become clearer to me that this distinction is unhelpfully rigid and binary. As I first realised in Dreaming the Map, you may be putting down a zero draft, or a radically different third draft, or a mind-map of how your characters feel about each other, or a family tree, or a sketch-map of the farm; you may even draw your characters' faces, if you're a much better draughtswoman than me ... but all you're ever really doing is imagining on paper.
And what that means is that it's not a given that "planning" has to come before "drafting". I do plan imagine on paper before I start actually setting down my first try at the text itself. But I always plan in pencil, and I often revise my plans in the light of the first draft. And I often stop and grab pencil and paper to sketch notes on a bit of past or future plot, or to clarify some geography, or map the tensions between several characters in a scene.That's planning - but it's really just another way of using words to pin down my sense of this story. And especially towards the end, a scene may come out far too bony, just dialogue and basic gestures, because I know exactly where it needs to get to, and I'm not "seeing" the rest of the picture: the dialogue isn't much more than a skeleton - a plan, if you like - for the fully-realised scene.
That blogpost by Mrs T describes how she's realised it's not a sign of failure to find you need go back to a bit of planning when you're halfway through the draft. And someone else, considering herself a hard-wired panster, and having just downloaded my planning grid and applied it to her "draft F", found all sorts of things clarified, straightened, and come into order.
In fact, on the macro scale of things I suspect that lots of writers do their planning retrospectively; splurge the first draft, dream on paper, follow it wherever it goes. Only then do they have a clear enough idea of what this project is to go back to the beginning and make sense of the big architecture, and how it all fits together. Indeed, some write whichever scene they're moved to write, and trust to the future that it'll all stitch together.
The risk with this approach is a) either you get too wedded to lovely characters/scenes/plot-strands which don't actually work, and have trouble getting yourself to murder them when they turn out not to be wanted; or b) that, try as you will to believe that you've "written" the novel but nothing's set in stone, once the boundaries of the project seem to be established, it's really difficult to move imaginatively beyond them: you never stand back and question the underlying assumptions about what this project is.
There's one writer (I've a feeling it's A L Kennedy but I could easily be wrong) whose novel process is basically writing a first draft, throwing it away, writing a new first draft... Not all of us could face doing that, but it does take that same willingness to murder not just your darlings but everything else, to work this way successfully. But if you can trust yourself to be both ruthlessly organised AND wildly open-minded about how the project needs to change, becoming what you might call a retrospective planner might just be the way for you.
Update: 9th March 2017
Since writing this, I've written a major post about Taming Your Novel, which explores all the ways that you might sort out an out-of-hand draft. And one of the things I realised is that they're the same things that you might use to plan before you start that first draft. It really is all dreaming on paper: the only difference is where your first shot at the continuous prose that looks like a novel-in-the-making comes, among all the other things we do to write our story.
