Plotting is pants! by Dorothy Courtis

 The very first writing class I went to, in 1971, was led by the lovely, now sadly late, Scottish crime writer Alanna Knight. She told us firmly that our novels should be 60,000 words long (which is what the publishers of the day demanded for genre fiction) and have 12 chapters, which followed a rising arc up to the penultimate chapter when all is revealed, and the last chapter wraps it all up.

I believed her. I followed her instructions. I wrote my first novel (science fiction) that way. And the second (Gothic suspense). And the third (Young Adult adventure).

And struggled. And gave up and went and edited and published other people's non-fiction books for years and years and years.

It wasn't until much later that I learnt that you don't have to do it that way. If that's not the way you're hard-wired. There are plotters who thrive on such a structured approach, and pantsers who wing it, following the words to wherever... But there is a downside to pantsing. I get about halfway into my story, following all my crazy ideas wherever they want to go, and then I hit a wobble and the momentum stops.

This is when I browse YouTube videos, podcasts, books - all the how-to-do-it stuff that's out there. And there's lots. My current favourites are K. M. Weiland, Brendon Sanderson... too many to list! I pull books off my shelves and read all about the different kinds of structure, then I try to force my recalcitrant story into one of the recommended patterns.

And I end up like the centipede. You know: when asked which foot he started off to walk with, he got so confused (overthinking again!) that he just fell over. 

But just like the centipede, you have to get up and start going again. Which is the next stage. When I'm so saturated with other people's ideas of how to write a book that I completely lose patience and sit down and just get stuck in again! But with a better idea of where I'm going, what's missing, and what needs done... a soupcon of structure, in fact.

But I know I couldn't do it the other way round. It seems to me once you know the whole story from beginning to end (in other words got it all plotted out) there's no fun writing it. It's just typing.

But I could be wrong! 

 Dorothy Courtis has been writing for a long while (as Dorothy Stewart) and is now having fun writing crime/mystery fiction. She should be working on book 3 of her Somerset mystery series...