Abandoning the Pantser Mentality

In my novel-writing pursuits,I have often considered myself a thoroughly committed "pantser," that being someone who writes novels solely by the seat of his/her pants, and the mortal enemy (not really, ok maybe) of the "plotter," who methodically outlines and over-structures the novel before writing a single word.  Of late, though, I am finding issues with story arc, character development, and other novel elements that a little pre-planning may have avoided.  And I am suffering from plotter-envy: the greenish tint that one gets when trying to revise something that was created without any blueprint and you realize that it would have been much simpler to add a second-floor bathroom if you had only planned to have the house built with plumbing fixtures upstairs at least so you would not have to rip out walls and supports to completely rebuild parts of the house to get that bathroom in there.  And thus, the blueprint analogy has been taken too far now.

Still, there's certainly something to be learned here.  What I am uncertain is whether or not the lesson is that I should try to be more like a "plotter" or whether I am just not liking some phase of what I am doing and creating excuses for the holes I have found.  Either way, one thing is true: structure is needed, whether you do it before or after the first draft.  Every good story has some level of structure to it, whether it is intentional or accidental, and whether it was pre-planned or revised to fit some sort of mold.  There are expectations of the reader that have to be met, and my rambling 70,000 word drafts miss the mark on several of those expectations.

So, while I work on finishing up that last chapter of White Rock, all the while woefully lamenting the revision that that puppy is going to need, I'm going to start work on a sequel.  Or prequel.  Or book four in a fourteen book series.  But I am going to do it differently.  With purpose.

So to accomplish this little methodology change, I have some growing to do.  But I also have some background work to do (the nasty little not-so-fun research that I should do to make sure my writing isn't totally unbelievable when I'm trying to write crime and mystery fiction about real locations and fake people, the character sketches and identifying characteristics that help me craft those fake people in my head, and the big picture arcs of where my story is going both on a plot level and a character development level).  Hopefully, having a little more of a blueprint will help with my structure and provide me with some building blocks for when I decide to go back and do a revision on White Rock.  We will see.

So here are some things I intend to do:

• Create Character Sketches - I normally don't do this until halfway through a draft, or as I go.  That makes it difficult to tell how someone will react to a given situation.  Perhaps "knowing" the characters before I go in will help me understand who they are and why they would react a certain way.
• Outline (a little) - I think that my real hatred of outlining comes from the fact that the one time I have tried to write a novel with a complete outline, I had two problems: 1) I dramatically overestimated how long my scenes were, and 2) I started outlining at the scene level (not the story arc level).  Outlining does not strip my creativity, it simply moves it from the writing phase up a little bit.  But I can't over-outline or else I start writing the story twelve times in a row.
• Follow some sort of process - In order to have some sort of repeatable process, which to me is key to the lather, rinse, repeat of generating book after book, I have to have some method to the madness.  So far my methodology has been: sit down thinking I want to write a book, write a book, lament over the problems in the book that I now have to fix.  I need something a little better than that, and I'm looking at the way other authors do it as well to help create that methodology.
• A little research - I have for a while thought that I need to take a day (or more) vacation from my day job to do a little travel around Dallas and some research, taking pictures of sites/scenery, visiting the police station (for some authenticity help), and getting ideas from people and locations as well.  Not sure I am going to get to do this TOO quickly, but hopefully I can get this done as I think it will add quite a bit of benefit.
• Play with Scrivener - Although it is still in beta, Scrivener for Windows has some neat and interesting things.  I am not yet sold that it is a good tool for me to write in, but it does look like an extremely helpful plotting/planning tool.  And the developers are helpful - from my early beta testing, I requested some features and they actually got implemented.  Now if only I can find the $40 for when it exits beta.

What I am not going to do is about as important as what I am going to do.  Here are some thoughts there:

• Write the novel before I write the novel - I can't get to the level of detail where my writing is complete autopilot.  But I need more than a blank page to keep me moving.
• Overestimate my ability to write long scenes - Once upon a time I thought I could write 20 scenes or so to hit 50,000 words.  Then I found some of what I considered "scenes" were more like 500 word paragraphs.  At a minimum, if I'm writing an 80,000 word draft, I am guessing I should target between 40 and 100 scenes.  But again, maybe I won't outline to that level.
• Ignore story structure - OK this should be obvious, since it's what I want to fix, but there's a way (and where there's a way, there's an idiot like me who can stumble across that way) to create a really intricate outline and ignore elements that end up making it work.  So I need to not do that.

I am sure there are more things for me to do and not do as I try to be the zebra changing my stripes.   But then again, maybe I'm just some other animal losing my stripes as I grow up and no longer need to hide in the grass.  We'll see via this fun experiment.

So - if you're a plotter - any tips for me?  What I should do?  What I shouldn't do?  Anything helps.