Seat of Your Pants: The idea

Hey guys, and welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m so glad you stopped by. As it’s now March (how did that happen?), it’s time for a new series! And I’ve chosen something that I think you’ll all really enjoy. It’s something I actually get a lot of questions about, from many of you. I think because it’s not something many people really think of, when they think of writing. Sure, writers know what this is and a little bit of how it works, but other people don’t. And some of you, I’m sure, aren’t actually writers.

So let’s talk about writing by the seat of your pants.

That’s how I write.

See, there are two main ways of writing a novel. There’s the outline method, which I’m really not adept at telling you about, because I don’t use it. And there’s what I like to call the “seat of your pants” method, which I know a great deal about—because that’s the way I write. The majority of writers either use an outline or they don’t, but for those of you who cannot fathom writing without an outline, stay tuned. I’ll tell you all about it, over the month of March.

Seat of Your Pants: The idea

Usually, writing always starts with an idea. Whether you’re outlining or pantsing, it always starts with an idea. If you don’t have an idea, then you probably don’t really know what you want to write about. But that’s beside the point.

We seat of your pants writers often come up with an idea, and we think, “oh, that could be a cool story”—but it’s from there that things get different.

Unlike outliners, who would then (I assume) sit down and come up with an outline for their idea before they start writing, pantsers just start writing. We just type up the idea we had, and we roll with it. We see where it takes us.

Sometimes that means we’ll write a few lines, delete them, and rewrite the same lines with slightly different wording. Sometimes it means that we’ll just sit down and flow out more words than we know what to do with—and that’s what we’re usually hoping for. More words are better than less, when you’re writing by the seat of your pants. We want more words, because if you have too many words, you can always cut them. It’s harder to add words, after the fact.

I don’t know if this is true for all seat of your pants writers, but for me, this part is all about discovery. It’s about meeting some characters, whether they be our primary characters or not, and getting to know the world a little bit.

It can also be a challenge, which I often enjoy, because sometimes the idea we have is for later in a story, or for what we think might be the end of a story, and so we have to backtrack and think of a beginning that we think might match with the ending we’ve thought of—and to be honest, I’m not often right. I have a whole pile of endings that I would love to use someday, that I’ve backtracked from in an effort to give the story a really good start, but none of them worked out the way I wanted. And you know what? That honestly made it a lot more fun.

That’s how it begins. That’s where we start from. We get an idea, and we roll with it—wherever it takes us, whatever shape it turns into. And we love the discovery of it, the experience of finding out what this idea can turn into along the way. Why? Because it’s very rarely what we thought it would be, when we started.

And how fun is that?

[love]

{Rani Divine}