Plotting vs Pantsing 13: Brett Battles



May 15th, 2010

Who’s a sturdy enough talent to go 13th in this thread? Brett Battles, whose Jonathan Quinn “Cleaner” series is among my favorite of recent years. Brett’s books — THE CLEANER, THE DECEIVED, and SHADOW OF BETRAYAL, the last of which will be reincarnated in a paperback edition on May 25 — are models of the form. The form, in this case, is the breakneck, intercontinental thriller with solid, emotionally affecting characters, a plot twist every time the reader gets comfortable, and a resolution that’s always unexpected and, in retrospect, inevitable. If I sound like a fan, I am. After I read THE CLEANER, I used it as a sort of primer for pacing (this will be news to Brett) and I think my books are the better for it. So here’s where those amazing plots come from. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had or overheard conversations about this topic. I guess that’s probably because it’s a core, nuts-and-bolts part of the writing process. It’s funny. Writers can be pretty vehement about their particular position. “Writing a detailed outline is the only way to go.” “Outline? No way. I just write and let the story tell itself to me.” If you’d asked me a few years ago where I fell, I would have said without hesitation that I was a pantser. In fact, I was probably sitting on the Pantser’s Board of Directors. I was the one saying, “I let the story tell itself to me.” It worked for me, but that’s because I had all the time in the world to write a book. But then I got my first contract. Per that contract I had to provide a synopsis of whatever book I planned on writing to my editor. Obviously I didn’t have to do this for my first book as it had been written prior to getting a deal. But for the second book? Absolutely. Still, I considered myself a full-fledged, card-carrying pantser. So when I wrote my proposal for Book 2 I made my synopsis as short and as vague as possible. (Note: I also included the first two or three chapters.) Fine for me, I thought. Lots of room to move around. Thankfully, my editor went for it. But that’s where the problems started. I had a year to write that second book. It sounded like a lot of time, but at that point, in addition to being a novelist, I still had a full-time day job, so as I progressed, I realized that a year wasn’t long at all. The problem with writing without a clear idea of where you’re going is that you can write yourself into a corner. And that’s pretty much what I ended up doing. The draft that I delivered by my deadline still needed some serious work, and it took another four months before I got the book into shape. You would have thought I would have learned my lesson from that. But no, I still considered myself a pantser. After all, Book 2 turned out pretty well.So once agai, I delivered a two-page synopsis and some sample chapters, and, once again, my editor said, “Go for it.” I’m sure you can guess the result. Once more the process of writing the book (still with the day job) took far too much time. And, like before, the draft I delivered still needed some serious work. (Thankfully, though, not as much as had been required for Book 2.) So when I set out to write Book 4 of my series, I vowed that I would do things differently. This would be the first one I would write as a full-time novelist, so I wanted to off right. But wanting and doing, as we all know, can be two different things. The proposal I gave my editor: 2-page synopsis and sample chaps. The same old song. This book, though, did go faster. But that was a product of two things. The first, and probably the most influential, was, as I mentioned, that I had no day job interfering with my writing schedule. But the second was that, when I hit around pag2 250, I stopped and took a full week to map the book out . . . where I was, where I should be going . . . from each of my characters’ points of view. (Not really relevant, but here’s what I did: I went down to Office Depot and bought those gigantic post-it notes. Seriously gigantic. We’re talking something like three feet by four feet. Each central character got a note, and then, below their name, I listed out, in point form, the story from their POV. I think I ended up having something like eight or nine of these post-its hanging on my walls. Doing this enabled me to get a handle on where my story was going. When I turned the book in, it was much more finished than my previous books had been. Not perfect, but definitely closer to the finish line.) I knew that for my next book, I was going to have to do something different. This time I wrote a five-page synopsis along with chapters. That might not seem like a big leap, but it was for me. Then a funny thing happened. My publisher asked if my fifth book, instead of being another in my Jonathan Quinn series, could be a standalone. This prospect was exciting to me as I was feeling the itch to write a standalone. It wasn’t that I was tired of my series, far from it. I just wanted to branch out a little. When I sat down to figure out the proposal for the standalone, I knew that I was going to have to be more detailed than I’d been in the past. My problem this time was that I had more than one idea, and couldn’t figure out which one to present. So I decided, what the hell, let my publisher choose. I wrote a synopsis for each idea, each of them between 10 and 15 pages in length. These were much more detailed maps than I’d ever produced before. Oh, and I also did sample chapters for all three stories. (I know, I know. Overkill.) Bantam chose one of the stories, and, in a little over two weeks, I wrote the first 150 pages of the new book. Yes, blazing fast. I’d never written anything so fast. But there was no question but that this was a direct result of those more detailed plans. (Okay, just to make the story accurate and more complete — though, again, not necessarily relevant — at that 150-page mark, I hit a hiccup. I happened to read a novel by a person I respect who had set her story in the same location as I was setting mine. Turns out that plot and the one I was working on were pretty damn close. Too close for me to continue. So what did I do? I wrote another 12-page synopsis, keeping a few of the elements from the story I’d been working on, but really creating something completely new. I started at page zero again on November 4th of last year and had a rough draft just over one month later, on the 7th of December. A month after that, I had a polished draft that was tighter and more complete than any other manuscript I’d ever turned in.) I was a pantser, but I am no more. That’s not to say that I’m all all-out, detail-oriented outline, either. I’m a kind of a blend, a hybrid if you will.My optimum working process seems to be first creating a 10 to 15-page story map with room to expand and change, and then putting my butt in a chair and writing. the map/outline/synopsis gives me the confidence to plow forward. In fact, I don’t think I looked back at my synopsis once when I was writing that last book. But I knew in my mind that I’d figured it all out, so I knew how far I could stray. The bottom line is that each writer has a different way of writing. But what I think we need to do is periodically evaluate whether those methods are helping us be our best. This is not some static, forever kind of thing. For a long time writing by the seat of my pants worked well for me. It was really the only way I could do it. But then things changed, so I changed. And who knows, in the future I may change again.

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