Writing by the seat of my pants

I have a confession to make, I am a total pantser.

What I mean by that is that I write by the seat of my pants. When I start a novel, I have a general idea of where I want it to go, how it ends, the characters and several scenes that I envision in the book, including the high and low points. But that's it. I don't write a synopsis generally under either half-way through the book or until I finish.

I would love to be plotter. I realize that when the time comes and I have an agent, and I'm just working on proposals, it might help to be more of a plotter, but I haven't gotten there yet. I've been thinking more and more about this since I've been doing NaNoWriMo. Chris Baty's book, No Plot, No Problem could have been written just for me.

I guess I love the uncertainty when I sit down at the computer of not knowing what is going to come out once I type. Watching the characters take shape and take over. At the moment, my characters are telling me who is important and who is just a minor player in the drama that I'm creating. Others are demanding more time. I don't know if I would know that if I had plotted the book out more beforehand.

I also have an untidy mind, constantly jumping from one thing to another, which leads to my untidy apartment, so of course I would be an untidy writer!

Of course writing by the seat of your pants means that it's alot more work in the revisions process, trying to shape a novel out of the morass of words on the page. I like to think of it as polishing a diamond in the rough. You prune, and prune, cutting away the detritus until you have a bright, shiny diamond.

I've tried to be more of a plotter. I once took a Romance Writing Course at Marymount Manhattan College with an editor from Harlequin. I ended up writing a thirty page synopsis for a potential Harlequin Temptation. Have I written it? No. Why? Because just the sheer act of writing this huge document, with all the plot points etc, I kind of felt like I'd written the book somehow. All it needed was dialogue and description. But I just felt like I was done. There were no discoveries to be made, every thing was lined up all nice and neat. I cringed.

Don't get me wrong. I admire writers who can plot out their novels from beginning to end. I have friends like that and I sometimes envy them for being able to do that. I took a workshop with Suzanne Brockmann at National a few years ago, where she said that, just for herself, she writes 80 page synopses for her books. But then she has multiple storylines in her books, while I have just one or two at the most.

At some point, I'll have to try the whole plotting thing again. I have a trilogy that I want to write, and that will involve actual planning and plotting, and keeping track of the three stories, but for right now, I'm happy being a pantser.

How many other people out there write by the seat of their pants? A show of hands please.