{"id":922,"date":"2013-09-05T21:08:20","date_gmt":"2013-09-06T02:08:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/?p=922"},"modified":"2013-09-05T21:08:20","modified_gmt":"2013-09-06T02:08:20","slug":"regarding-pants","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/?p=922","title":{"rendered":"Regarding Pants"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"pants\"So I’m a pantser.\u00a0 Mind out of the gutter, people, I’m talking about the style of writing, the kind of writer opposed to “outliner” (as in “seat of the pants”).<\/p>\n

Now, aside from the fact that being a pantser makes me sound vaguely like a pervert, I am content with pantsing, for the most part.\u00a0 Writing my way into a plot is how I’ve always done it, after all.\u00a0 Clearly, there are advantages and disadvantages to being either a pantser or an outliner.\u00a0 Outliners are no doubt less likely to find themselves in literary cul de sacs, while pantsers are more used to throwing out large chunks of prose and doing things over if they do run into trouble.\u00a0 Pantsers go where the muse leads, and write in a free-spirited, devil-may-care fashion, potentially discovering synergistic bits of wonderfulness, while outliners are less likely to end up with extraneous characters who have no real business in the book.<\/p>\n

But one problem with being a pantser is that none of those “How to Write a Bestseller in 40 Days” books really work for us.\u00a0 It is obviously easier to instruct someone on step by step writing if they already outline, or can figure out how to do so.\u00a0 But it does a pantser no good, trying to follow steps that work for someone else.\u00a0 Of course, we pantsers are tailor-made for the advice one gets in NaNoWriMo – “Just hurl words onto the page and see what happens!” and that sort of thing.\u00a0 I pity the outliner who has to try to make sense of a bunch of random words they’ve forced themselves to spit out.<\/p>\n

The whole business reminds me of the way things go in the cycling world, actually.\u00a0 Cyclists are often told that the most efficient way to ride is in a lower gear with a higher cadance, and biomechanically, that is no doubt true, just as the most efficient way to write is likely to develop a careful plan ahead of time .\u00a0 In both cases, I sometimes get the sense that well-meaning advice givers feel like I’m being contrarian.\u00a0 But some people are just made to grind big gears and write with no particular plan.\u00a0 We don’t mean anything by it, it’s just the way it is.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So I’m a pantser.\u00a0 Mind out of the gutter, people, I’m talking about the style of writing, the kind of writer opposed to “outliner” (as in “seat of the pants”). Now, aside from the fact that being a pantser makes me sound vaguely like a pervert, I am content with pantsing, for the most part.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-922","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-writing-things"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/922","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=922"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/922\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=922"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=922"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=922"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}