Pantser or Plotter?

By June Shaw

If you write books, short stories, or plays, do you prefer to plot them or write them by the seat of your pants?

There is no right or wrong answer.

Authors do both, often depending on their preference or the stage of writing in which they find themselves. The genre in which they write sometimes makes a difference, too.

In a recent lively discussion between many published and unpublished writers and a popular literary agent, I heard unpublished writers mainly say they wrote without having a plan of where they were going. Most of the published writers, however, said they were pantsers when they first started writing, but then discovered writing a basic plot first helped most.

Our agent in attendance said romance writers were often pantsers but that mystery authors, whom she mainly represents, create a plot first.

One of my major deficiencies is organizing -- almost anything. I wish I didn't have that problem. But one friend I taught with does the opposite -- even her pantry is alphabetized. I'd like to keep parts of me and parts of her and fit about halfway between us with my home. And my writing.

I am plotting more with my novels now than I did when I first started with novels. It's a little easier for me as time passes.

What do you prefer? Sitting at the computer and dashing out words without knowing where you're going? Or having a plan ahead of time and fitting your creative words in their proper places?

Common Writing Flaws

By Chester Campbell

I'm in the midst of reading manuscripts for a mystery writing competition. I thought it might be instructive to mention a few of the most common shortcomings I've found. Overall, the writing has been quite competent, but most entries could use the sure hand of a skilled editor. I took on the job with some trepidation. When reading for pleasure, I (like most readers, I suspect) tend to ignore minor miscues if the story is interesting. With this task, I have been forced to adopt a more critical stance.

The most common problem I've found is getting too carried away with the characters or the settling and failing to move the plot along. Let's face it, a mystery is about a crime and the difficulties it causes, usually including a murder. Character is important, but unless all these well-drawn people get involved in the crime or its solution before too many chapters pass, readers will lose interest. In so-called "literature," characters can go on doing mundane things ad nauseam, but in mysteries something critical has to happen.

In a minority of the manuscripts, the writer needed to loosen up when it came to dialogue. That's one place where reading the lines aloud helps. If it doesn't sound natural, it ain't. Some casual conversations sound more like lectures. Long, carefully constructed sentences instead of several fragments, the way real people talk.

One manuscript began: "It was a dark and stormy night." The second sentence said, "No really, it was a dark and stormy night." It was written as a humorous piece but rambled too much. The rules for the contest said you could send up to fifty pages. This one stopped at sixteen. If the manuscript ended there, it would make a great short story. But this was a novel-writing contest. Oh, well.

Another problem I encountered was overwriting. I got introduced to that subject early in my novel-writing career when I sent a manuscript of more than 600 typed pages to an agent. The agency was interested but said the story was overwritten and needed to be pared considerably. I didn't know what the term meant but quickly learned I was guilty of things like too much description. One of the contest entries is set in a popular European city and sounds too much like a travelogue.

Frequent shifts in point of view can be a show-stopper for a mystery writer. Constant head-hopping leads to confusion. You encounter an important point and wonder "how did he know that?" Then you realize you're wandering around in some other character's mind.

Fortunately, all of these problems are fixable. Unfortunately, most of the writers guilty of them don't realize what they're doing wrong. It's why the advice to let a competent editor critique your manuscript before you send it off is so important. We all make mistakes, and with a little extra effort we can correct them.

Mystery Mania

Writing: Fun, but Frustrating

By Chester Campbell

I've always contended that I don't consider writing books difficult since I enjoy doing it so much. I still go along with that premise, but I'll have to admit that the fifth Greg McKenzie mystery, which I just finished, turned out out to be, well, frustrating.

Being a seat-of-the-pants plotter, I write in a linear fashion. I start with the opening scene and move forward. I tell the story as it unfolds in the characters actions and in my own mind. Writing in this fashion results sometimes in the story getting finished before I'm ready for it to end. I discovered I was woefully short of enough words when it happened this time.

Over the years I have developed a rather terse style, partly as a result of reading Robert B. Parker. It helps speed up the pace. However, it sometimes leads to short conversations. Of course, that's also a reflection of my own conversational style. On the phone, I tend to give the facts as simply as possible and hang up. I'm not good at social chatting. I went back over my PI's interviews and worked to make them a bit more voluble, while sticking to the point of the dialogue.

Then I started looking for places to beef up the plot with new characters and new threads. I found a place for some good misdirection and another for planting a clue. I worked over descriptive passages in an attempt to make them more colorful and polished the red herrings until they sparkled like the pearls in an oyster.

I thought about just asking the publisher to do like some people claimed Parker's publisher did with some of his shorter mysteries. They said the books used larger type and wider margins to make a novelette look like a novel. But, with the revision finished, I had enough words and turned in the manuscript.

I suppose the smart thing to do if I run into such a situation again would be to step back and rethink the plot. Add a new subplot that would give an opportunity to further develop the characters and add new intrigue to the crime under investigation.

I'll keep that in mind as I start work on my second Sid Chance mystery. That one's still in the gestation stage. But it'll be fun to write, I'm sure.

Writing at a Snail's Pace

By Chester Campbell

I’m in the process of working on my fifth Greg McKenzie mystery. So far it has been moving like a snail racing across the street. Matter of fact, I wrote something about creating the plot on my personal blog (Mystery Mania) back toward the end of February, and I'm now only a third of the way through the writing. I suppose the problem is still as I characterized it earlier: "the old gray matter, she ain't what she used to be."

When I began working on the plot, the first idea out of the box did not deal with character or setting or plot action. Well, setting, in one of its narrow aspects. We're talking about time. The series has been moving at a leisurely pace through the calendar. Designed to Kill took place at the first of November, Deadly Illusions followed with the first blush of spring (does spring really blush?), and The Marathon Murders sweated out the steamy days of August. So, I reasoned, the next adventure should occur at Christmastime.

Wouldn’t you know, in Greg years, it’s still 2004. If I could do that, I wouldn’t be quite 80 yet. However, it presents a few problems in keeping the details straight. For example, the plot involves professional sports. In 2004, the arena where the Nashville Predators NHL team plays was called the Gaylord Entertainment Center or "The GEC" (pronounced Geck). Now it is the Sommet Center. So in the book it's only referred to as the "arena."

Anyway, back to the plot. As a seat-of-the-pants plotter, I had a basic idea, but I needed a cast of characters to do the work. I didn't want to get stuck with doing all that work myself. I had my main characters, Greg and Jill McKenzie, my indefatigable pair of senior sleuths, but a bunch of people was required for them to bounce off of.

I quickly came up with job descriptions for four possible bad guys or gals. And just as quickly I spotted the one who really “did it.” I picked an age and began to delve into the person's background. What would make this an interesting character? How did the killer become what they were today?

Okay, this is a mystery, and I’m not giving you any clues. I did a lot of Googling and bounced around the Internet quite a bit to track down some facts. Hmmm, come to think of it, back when I first began searching for stuff online, Yahoo was the big thing. But you don’t hear of people Yahooing. They’ve been sort of left in the dust, I suppose.

The subject of the plot is not one in which I’m particularly well versed, so I also searched about for some basic information on the business. Since it involves a conflict between people involved in two different sports, basketball and hockey, I decided my best bet was to talk with a TV sportscaster. Both Greg and I interviewed Rudy Kalis, sports director at Nashville's Channel 4, WSMV.

So far, Christmas has been sort of incidental to the action, but who knows how it will play out. A Christmas party provided an opportunity for Greg to get some information he needed. I suspect there's more to come.

Sometimes I start a book before I’m ready with a full-blown plot by sitting at the computer and writing a first page. It may not be the same first page I end up with, but it gets the window open and the curtains blowing. That's what happened this time. And after five books, it's my first experience with a murder on page one.

So after eight months of dilly-dallying around, promoting the heck out of my latest book and finding places to sign and sell all five current titles, I'm faced with the necessity of locking myself up (would be nice, but won't happen) and knocking out another 50,000 words in the next couple of months.

Wish me luck. And let me know how you're doing on your latest masterpeice.

Site Work

by Ben Small

Some weeks ago, Pat Browning blogged about how many times she doesn't have a clue about plotting her mysteries until she visits a site, or something like that. Well, that registered with me. Granted, I'd already been to Mount Rainier before I wrote Alibi On Ice, but having been to that site, having climbed that mountain, provided all the inspiration I needed for the story. It just flowed, naturally.

And when I was ready to write a second book, I had no idea what I wanted to write about, except that I wanted Morocco and Spain to be a part of it. My wife and I literally mapped the book's plot out over the course of a couple days on our hotel's cliff-side terrace in Arcos. The site we were in, and the sites and sights we'd seen, fed our imaginations. And maybe the wine we were sipping and the cheeses we nibbled helped a bit, too.

Same with my third book. I knew it would be a Denton Wright book, but I wasn't ready to wag the tail I'd left in The Olive Horseshoe. That will happen in the fourth book, set in Croatia and Slovenia, where we're heading now. The third book? I took a drive south of Tucson over the course of several days. Took lots of pictures. Then, looking at the pictures I'd taken on my computer, the plot just popped off the page, ran through my head, and then fell onto my word processor.

It's true, one can write a book about a place one's never visited. Many people do it. Not me. I want to go there, talk to the locals, take pictures, and soak up as much local color as I can. To me, that adds a realism one can't get from the internet alone.

But then that's just me.

Maybe Pat and I were related in another life...

Blast Away or Write...Edit?

By Chester Campbell


The conventional wisdom, based on how often I run across it, says you should plop down at your computer and dash off your story as fast as possible. Never mind the niceties, like finding the correct word or putting the commas in the right places. Just get the story down in 1s and 0s (that’s binary speak). When you reach the end, you have a first draft. Then you go back and start making a coherent manuscript out of it.

If you’re a detailed plotter or outliner, that would probably do the trick. My mind doesn’t work that way. I write chapters at a time, hopefully more than one. When I return to the computer, I go back over what I wrote last and edit. It has to sound right to me before I can go on.

I guess it’s the way my brain is wired. It doesn’t interrupt the story, since I have no idea where the story is going in the first place. The words stream out as I type, sometimes with a little help from an idea that pops up during my daily walk. Well, almost daily. As daily as circumstances allow.

With the first few chapters, I’ll usually go back to the beginning and start reading. After I get into the book, I’ll start a chapter or two before the point where I stopped writing. Besides eliminating the possibility of writer’s block, this technique engenders a feeling that I’m creating something worthwhile. I may change a word or two, a stronger verb or a more descriptive adjective. Sometimes I’ll delete a sentence or add one that gives a little different slant on things.

Individual chapters get another going-over thanks to my critique group. But we only meet twice a month. I’d better write more than two chapters a month if I’m going to finish this thing. That means only a limited number of chapters will get full scrutiny. I’ll give the completed manuscript to a couple of people who agree to read it.

By the time I get to that point, which most people call a “first draft,” it’s already been edited to a fare-thee-well. I will likely have made a number of significant changes to earlier incidents that need to match what happens later. That makes the final edit important, since I should catch any inconsistencies along the way. The final revision will take into account suggestions made by those who read the full manuscript.

I don’t advocate using this method if you’re comfortable with the way you write. But if you find you’re not happy with how the writing sounds when you take the pause that refreshes (you don’t have to drink a Coke), you might give it a try. It’s guaranteed to prevent writer’s block or your money back. Of course, you’d have to send me some money before I could do that—I take PayPal.

The Plot (Not the One in the Cemetery)

I’ve always felt that characters are more important than the plot, or the situation you place them in. But I certainly don’t mean to infer that plot is unimportant.

Plot is cause and effect, or the border of actuality. If someone makes your protagonist angry and he considers throwing a rock through the antagonist’s window, it’s not a plot unless he actually does the deed. His actions tell a great deal about his own character and determine whether the readers are going to care about him. The effect of his actions, or the reaction to the broken window, is what actually creates the plot.

A character’s thoughts and emotions cross over the line into action and reaction. But no action in itself can be considered plot if it doesn’t affect the outcome of the story. Plotting decides what’s important to your storyline. If the action doesn’t apply directly to the resolution, leave it out. Going off on tangents only confuses the reader and makes her impatient to get on with the story. Sure, you can have subplots but they had better tie in eventually to the main storyline and reach a resolution before the book’s conclusion.

Ansen Dibell says in his book, Plot, that “one of the forces may be external to the main character: a villain, an opponent, a set of circumstances, a feature of the environment or of the landscape. Or both forces may be within the protagonist; the fear of doing something and wrestling with the need to do it; a sense of injury wrestling with love or admiration, as with a person of any age trying to come to terms with a demanding parent.”

A writer’s job is to convince the reader that what's happening in the plot is important not only to the characters involved, but to the writer as well. If the writer doesn’t really care about the characters, the reader definitely won’t.

Struggling to stay alive, such as the young men in Golding’s Lord of the Flies, is the external form of the characters' struggles. But the battle of fear, courage and distrust of the unknown is the internal struggle that has to be addressed to ensure that your story is both gripping and convincing. There should be both an outer and inner plot which mirror or reinforce the other. They may even be in stark contrast, creating an even mightier struggle for the protagonist to overcome.

As one wise veteran writer once observed: "a plot scene should ideally contain two antagonistic characters who duke it out until one scores a knockout at the end of the scene."