Showing posts with label pantser. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pantser. Show all posts

Tuesday, August 23, 2016

The Process by Victoria Chatham

 


Earlier this month I attended the When Words Collide conference in Calgary and spent nearly three days listening to presentations, discussions on various writing topics by panels and – best of all – talking to other writers. One topic that seemed to consistently crop up was that of the process of writing. What is this magical process? As it turns out, there is no one-size-fits-all solution.



What one writer loves, another abhors. Take Scrivener, for instance. I know several writers who swear they could not write a book without it. I looked at Scrivener, but whichever way I looked at it, however many people explained parts of the program to me, it made no sense. Rather than make the writing easier, it seemed like more hard work. Another author writes in longhand and then revises when she transcribes her work to the computer. That I can understand a little more. There’s something very basic about sitting with pen and paper and letting your words flow across the page in total freefall, the method by which Canada’s great W.O. Mitchell (Who Has Seen the Wind, Jake and the Kid, Roses Are Difficult Here to name just a few of his titles) wrote and which has been the basis of many authors giving birth to their ideas.

The idea of freefall is to simply write, with no attention to sentence structure, grammar, punctuation or any kind of editing. Use as many adverbs as you like! As Nora Roberts has said, you cannot edit a blank page. In getting down the bones of whatever your idea is, you are filling your pages and therefore have something to go back to revise and edit. Freefall is different to stream of consciousness which is an internal monologue reflecting a person’s thoughts, feelings or observations on what they see about them, whether it is another person, an event or something that has caught their attention. It is written in much the same way as freefall. That is, without worrying about grammar or the editing gremlin on your shoulder. Stream of consciousness writing does not actually tell a story.

You may be familiar with the term pantser, which refers to a writer who sits down at his/her computer and writes. I lean towards being a pantser. The only time I resort to actual plotting is if I get lost in the middle, when it becomes something of back-paddling scramble. My usual process is to write timelines for my major characters, decide what is going to happen to them, do whatever research I need to do and then sit down and write. Being an editor at heart I usually read the last six pages before I start another writing session, just to get myself up to speed on what I wrote yesterday and revise as I go. At the start of a book I’ll decide how many chapters it will be and stick a post-it for each chapter on my white board. There may be some notes about that chapter, more often not. I have to say that the further I get into a book, the less social I become. In fact, at about the half way point I am so engrossed I have been known to become quite grumpy if interrupted.


Once my book is finished, it goes to my critique partners and beta readers and when I’ve done whatever revisions might be necessary I kiss it goodbye and send it to my publisher. My process after finishing a book is similar to après skiing. There’s wine, chocolate, cozy blankets and sleep – lots of sleep.  

Find me and my books at: 

Wednesday, September 23, 2015

From Pantser to Plotter by Victoria Chatham





Every writer falls into one of these categories, some writers may be comprised of a little of both. When I started writing I was definitely a pantser, the type of writer who sits in front of a computer and goes with the flow. As long as I had my characters, the rest would take care of itself, right? Well, not exactly.
My first book held marked similarities to raising my first child. Regardless of what I thought, I hadn’t got a clue what I was doing. To say I struggled with that first book is putting it mildly. At one point I had followed every lead my heroine gave me and finished up writing about her grandmother in pre-war Montreal
and how, pregnant and alone, she ended up in war-torn France fighting with the resistance forces. Great stuff, even though I’m blowing my own trumpet here.
However, that was not the story I was writing. I was writing a contemporary western romance.and badly at that. Had I taken the time to consider more than just my characters I would have saved myself a great deal of time. I’m not a fast writer, and when I realized how much time I’d wasted, I went back to the drawing board as it were.
Yes, I had my characters. They usually present themselves to me fully formed. I know their names and what they look like. Next is to fill in their character questionnaire, even complete a character interview. I know my characters well by this stage but throwing them on the page and expecting things to happen just didn’t work. I found writing historical romance or fiction easier in that I simply looked up the year (god bless Google), to see what major events were taking place world-wide and went from there for my background but it still wasn’t exactly a plot, more of an idea.
When I started writing my soon-to-be-released contemporary western romance, Loving That Cowboy, I soon ran into a brick wall. I’m sure many of you will know what that feels like. The words were just not there. It wasn’t writer’s block per se, more like this writer’s ineptitude. After one very frustrating day when I wanted to File 13 all ten pages I’d managed to produce, I was ready to give up. That was when I became a plotter.
I sat down and started from scratch, looking at my two leading characters and figuring out how to get them together and listed dozens of ‘what ifs?’. All that took time, but as I reached each plot point I noted it on a pink post-it and stuck it on my white board. Very pretty it looked too. Not only that, there was great satisfaction in removing the post-its as I reached each plot point. Now I really felt that I was getting somewhere. Sure there was a fair amount of rewriting on the way, but that is inevitable.
I also went back to several of my craft books, especially Deborah Dixon's Goal, Motivation & Conflict. She recommends watching six specific movies to illustrate her lessons. Great. I love movies. I spent a week watching some of those she recommended and some I chose to work with to determine how much I'd learned. I wrote notes, I went back to the book Save the Cat for more on plotting within the three act structure and finished up that week revisiting Techniques of the Selling Writer. Thank goodness I held on to those books when I packed for my last move.
Having tried both methods, I think from now on I’ll be doing much more plotting instead of relying on my characters to take me somewhere. How about you? Are you a plotter or a pantser, or maybe a bit of each?


For more information about Victoria go to:

www.victoriachatham.webs.com





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