Writing With the Jellyfish
Following up on my post about Writing Without a Net, I’ve found that there’s also been some derision about pantsers saying an outline kills their creativity and idea. The logic, I guess, is that if it doesn’t happen to an outliner, it shouldn’t happen to a pansters. Or there’s an implication that we didn’t do the outline correctly.
Several years ago, I was struggling with what I thought was a problem with structure in my story (turned out to be a problem interfering with the structure, which had a very different solution). A free outline workshop popped up, billed as being “pantser friendly.” What I didn’t understand then was there are people who are more midway between the left and right brain — they need some structure but they also need some of the freedom not outlining can give them. This workshop was for them.
So I decided to use a throwaway idea for the workshop. The workshop lasted for four weeks, and just about every person in it instantly got the outline and got value from it. But there were two of us who struggled every single time the lessons came up. In some cases, it was very difficult coming up with the material — I was frustrated personally by the insistence by the instructor that I needed to do characterization as part of it. She wasn’t buying that I could set that aside. I almost quit the workshop every week because it was that much of a struggle for me. But I wanted to see it through. One of the sessions did produce intriguing results once I figured out what it was. It was fingers on chalkboard getting through two the later sessions. I had multiple people explaining to me how to do it, and it was still extremely difficult.
Still, when I was finished, I decided about a month later to try the workshop outline on the novel I was just starting. I did the first part with the intriguing results, but it was very difficult for me to do. Any excitement from the workshop was gone, and I now felt like I was swimming against the current. Not only not getting anywhere, but tiring myself out. Then I pulled out the materials for the two I’d had trouble with — utterly no idea how I got through them. They were incomprehensible for me.
Not so pantser friendly. At that point, I tossed the outline effort and decided to go back to the way I had been doing things. Only now, when I looked at the idea, it felt exhausted to me. Like I’d written the story, finished, and couldn’t write any more. That was what struggling with an outline for exactly three planned chapters. Instead of going with the current like my jellyfish friend here, I exhausted my muse by battling with the process. That idea still sits on my hard drive. May never go anywhere.
I’m much better going with the flow, or the current, and try to steer the direction a little bit than trying to control everything.
What do you find frustrating when you write? Do you need to map out every stop along the way or just point the story ahead?
