Ah, the eternal writer debate. Pantser vs. Plotter. Is it better to plot your stories or to jump in and fly by the seat of your pants? There are a lot of blogs and videos out there on the subject and here’s the answer…neither! Or both! But you should still choose wisely. What works for you is what’s best for you. If you want to plot, do it. If you want to discover the story as you write, do it.

Just to clarify some vocabulary for those who are unaware:

A plotter is someone who plans their stories ahead of time.

A pantser is someone who starts writing stories without planning ahead.

A planter is someone who falls in between those two extremes.

There is no one way to write, but each path has pitfalls you need to be aware of. The one we are discussing today is consistency. How do your characters behave? What does your main character want? If you have magic, how does it work? What is the setting like? What is the focus of the story? How does it end? The answers to each of these questions should be mostly consistent throughout your story.

We are going to break these questions into two varieties: Emotional and Factual.

Traditionally, plotters are thought to have better consistency. They planned their story before they wrote it – They must be more consistent!

That’s not entirely the case. While plotters tend to have tremendous factual consistency, they may have issues when it comes to the emotional ones. On the other hand, pantsers tend to have greater emotional consistency but often struggle to keep the facts straight.

Let’s see why and how we can mend it.

Factual

It is pretty clear why plotters have better factual consistency. Before they begin to write a book, they’ve already planned the story and built a world. They may have word documents full of lore, setting, and plot or a Campfire Pro file populated with characters, timelines, and maps.

The facts are already written. They need only a quick glance at their notes to remember which town lies west of the main character’s hometown or what items are required to cast a spell. This gives them the incredible power to not miss a fact on the first draft.

This also gives them grace when writer’s block strikes. Instead of being completely lost, they can take a look at their outline and know what comes next in the story.

At first glance, it seems like plotters have it set. Take some time to plan things out, and you won’t have to worry down the line. Just like the Boy Scouts said, be prepared.

On the other hand, pantsers may have a much harder time keeping things straight. As they write new scenes, they may need to keep flipping back to their earlier pages to make sure that facts in the 14th chapter match those in the 2nd. This can be incredibly tedious.

This is where pantsers may find themselves in hot water. Especially if they accidentally write themselves into a plot hole. Perhaps they forgot a critical piece of information from earlier that contradicts an important element at the end. Fixing this requires careful edits, and those edits might cause a ripple effect that requires even more edits.

Not an ideal place to be.

There is an easy way to help prevent this situation though. By taking a page from the plotters.

Pantsers need not pre-plan stories if they don’t want to, but they can do what’s called parallel writing.

The idea of parallel writing is to mimic the series bibles of the plotters as you write your novel. Create a resource separate from your manuscript, and use it to record important information. Each new character, location, relationship, or any aspect of your worldbuilding gets recorded. Fill out a timeline as you go.

This will serve as a quick reference to help you avoid any kind of factual errors that may arise. When you are about to establish a new critical detail, you can seamlessly ensure that it doesn’t contradict anything you’ve already written.

Parallel writing will also save you a lot of time if you plan on writing sequels. It may be a year or more between books. Keeping a series bible as you write will help you stay consistent throughout your books. Parallel writing will only take a couple of minutes at the end of a writing session and will save you time down the road.

This can also help combat one of the pantser’s biggest enemies, writer’s block. The horrible question: what comes next?

Parallel writing will allow you to look at your timeline and see the trajectory of the story. You can easily see how your characters acted in the past. This will help you discover what comes next.

By the end of it, it will look like you were a plotter all along while having pantsed the whole way through. Clever girl.

Emotional

While plotters have the leg up with factual consistency, emotional consistency is where pantsers shine. The best pantsers are incredibly in tune with the emotions of their characters, and that is what guides the story. There is no plan, only believable characters acting exactly how they would if they existed in real life.

Here is where plotters can find themselves in trouble. Characters evolve as you write. You will discover things about them that you didn’t know at first, and sometimes plotting doesn’t leave room for that.

The plotter may write half their book then find out that their next plot point doesn’t make sense for the character once they’re on the page. Perhaps she is supposed to get on a train and leave her significant other, but you also established that your character is extremely loyal. She would never leave like that.

What do you do then? If she doesn’t get on that train, the rest of the plot is worthless, but if she gets on that train, you have betrayed her character.

That isn’t to say that pantsers are exempt from this issue. They may lose sight of characters’ motivations as well, but they tend to be more in touch with their characters’ emotions. Emphasis on tend. Everyone is different.

In his online lecture series, best-selling author Brandon Sanderson talks about the idea of promises. When you write, especially at the beginning, you are making promises. These are things that you have told the audience about your book indirectly.

One major promise you make is characterization. When you characterize someone one way, it makes a promise that this is how they will act (unless they go through something that causes them to change). Breaking that promise without a satisfying explanation will turn readers off. These kinds of broken promises will leave readers joking about your characters saying they only make decisions because “the plot demanded it!”

If that character gets on the train only because the plot demands it, you have broken a promise to your reader. That is unacceptable. You will have to find a new way.

Funnily enough, someone on our team recently discovered how this could make issues for his plot. Our head of marketing, Jackson is currently writing a book, and he mapped the whole thing out before he started. As he began to write, he started to realize that his outline didn’t match what the characters had become.

Jackson changed course and re-outlined the rest of the story to match his characters. He wasn’t willing to break the promises that he had made, and you shouldn’t be either.

As a plotter, re-outlining may be necessary. It may hurt to throw out part of the story that you worked hard to plot, but if it isn’t right for your characters, you must. That character can’t get on the train.

The plot may not end up being what you thought from the beginning but rather something that you end up rediscovering as you write. Take this quote from Stephen King’s On Writing.

No amount of planning characters can outright prevent the need to re-outline. Maybe you have planned your story to perfectly fit your characters, but there is no way to know for sure. Take a page from the pantsers and be willing to trust your characters. Otherwise, you will end up breaking promises and lacking emotional consistency.

Planters

Plotters and pantsers may seem like explicit labels, but the reality is that they are just two ends of a spectrum. A plotter can’t plan everything, and even the most stringent pantsers come into their stories with some idea of what is going to happen.

What this means for consistency is that you should stay wary of where you fit on the spectrum.

Do you tend to think up plots, but don’t worldbuild in advance? Perhaps you need to parallel write a series bible so you don’t forget your world’s details as you write.

Do you have a list of loveable characters, a world, but no sense of plot? Keep detailed notes on how the characters react in situations so you can decide how they will react later on.

These tactics can help you in the areas where you feel you are lacking. They exist to help your workflow. Having poor consistency can make your edit process arduous.

It is important to point out that if you are writing a rough draft, don’t sweat the small stuff at first. Small inconsistencies are fine and can be cleaned up easily, but what you really want to prevent are transformative edits. You don’t want to step away from your story to find an inconsistency that will force you to replace half of it.

Most of these transformative edits will come down to character decisions and promises. If you are a plotter, you need to be open to re-outlining if your characters demand it. If you are a pantser, you need to stay aware of who your characters are.

TL;DR: Whether you are a panster or a plotter, there are some simple things that you can do to help you keep your writing consistent. Pantsers can parallel write to keep important details consistent. Plotters can re-outline if they feel like their characters disagree with their plot.

If you have any questions or comments, join the discussion on our Discord! Next week we’ll be discussing how to write romance! Be sure to sign up for our newsletter below to stay in the loop on the blog and Campfire news.