On October 20th, Kasie and Rex started gearing up for another try at NaNoWriMo. Here are the show notes:

Theme for the day

NaNoWriMo Boot Camp: Planners and Pantsers

Agenda

• What is NaNoWriMo and should you do it?
• What are Pantsers?
• What are Planners?
• Which is better and what does the category say about you?

NaNoWriMo

Listen to the podcast

Apologies for last week’s aborted episode. We’ll be coming back together with Nick Roberts. He’s a cool dude and he took Kasie’s BIG mistake in stride. So thanks, Nick Roberts, let us know how we can support you and promote you. See you December 2nd!

So it’s Spooky Season and we’d normally dive head first into the ghoulish stuff but it’s also the two weeks leading up to NaNoWriMo and so we’re going to run a back-to-back prep sesh for the frenzy that is NaNo.

One plug for the ghoulish stuff: Halloween night (10/31) we’ll be at the British Bulldog Pub for a Noir at the Bar event brought to you by Raegan Teller and Chris Errol Maw of “Words and Wine” notoriety. The readers are Bonnie Stanard, Cathy Blake, Irene Stern, Kasie Whitener, AJ Brown, Paula Benson, Raegan Teller, and Phil Lenski. The program begins at 6 p.m. but Kasie should be there by about 5:30 if ya’ll wanna come have a pint.

So let’s break down this NaNoWriMo thing. What is it? National Novel Writing Month began in 1999 as a challenge to write 50,000 words in 30 days. Get their origin story here. They’re a non-profit of volunteers supporting writers and would-be authors and claim to have had a hand in books like Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus and Marisa Meyer’s Cinder – both kick-ass novels. Highly recommend.

In any case, it requires that participants create a profile online and then climb into the driver’s seat and start pumping out the words. And in Rex’s opinion deliver a steaming hot pile of garbage in thirty days. I’m not going to disagree since my first NaNo project is the vampire novel I’m still re-writing six years later.

Last year 51,670 participants completed the challenge. So imagine all those authors working through revisions and eventually querying and publishing those books. That’s a LOT of books!

More importantly, the NaNo legacy is the eternal debate between the planners and the pantsers and that’s a topic we’ve taken on before in Episode 172 back in January 2022 and again earlier this year as we talked about Aging Into Plannerhood in Episode 226.

But today we’re going to compare and contrast the two as a way of delivering best practices and then next week, we’re going to share our plans for the NaNoWriMo challenge – new novels we plan to produce in November. Seriously.

If you think we’re exaggerating on how pervasive this debate is, check out this book written specifically on how to turn pantsers into planners.

Folks in Columbia looking to connect with Cola Wrimos, here’s some dates and places for IRL interaction:

• Tuesday October 24, 6 pm – 8 pm Last Minute Plotting Bash at the Sandhills Branch of the Richland Library – Join us to finalize our Novels. We’ll review plotting methods and do all the last minute work to get them going.
• Saturday, October 28 1 pm – 3pm Creativity Kicker at the St Andrews Branch of the Richland Library located on Broad River Road. We’ll play Creativity games and loosen up our creative muscles for the month of November. Let’s send our inner editors away in style. I might also bring snacks! (Please note that this library is located not on St Andrews Road, but on Broad River Road. )
• You can find us on Facebook at Cola Wrimos and join our discord https://discord.gg/SRqXYtzNnV. 

Pantserhood

Pantsing is the original writing condition. It’s when you’re spontaneously moved to write something and sit down, pen-to-paper or fingertips-to-keyboard and let the words flow onto the page. Pantsers will sometimes know where they want the story to go, they’ll have a vague sense of direction, maybe characters, maybe world, but in general “pantser” describes someone writing by the seat of their pants.

Benefits to pantserhood (this link):

• Unbridled creativity – with characters, with setting, with plot, with magic. Anything goes!
• Smear the words – write without mind to grammar, spelling, etc. This is that “freewriting” instruction we used to get in school. Hate that shit.
• Be led by the story – follow the bends, don’t force the plot, feel the unfolding of the story
• Character discovery – learn about them as you go, let them unfurl, develop, over time and experience, instead of building the rigid lines that might make them cliche
• Optimism and bright-sided-ness – the pervasive belief that if you just keep writing, the story will form and flow. And it might.

Drawbacks, cons, or potholes to pantserhood (same link):

• Get lost in the story – what has already happened? When and how did we get here?
• Writer’s block is real – pantsers experience it more than planners. Just what are we gonna write now?
• Plot holes – “because magic” isn’t a thing, pantsers fall into plot holes more frequently because new ideas occur to them but aren’t supported by foreshadowing; this can be solved in revision, of course, but it does make the whole process messier.
• You better love revision – pantser manuscripts require the mantra: revise, review, repeat because every revision brings the piece closer to where you would be if you had just outlined it in the first place.

Plannerhood

The alternative, of course, is plannerhood. And if it sounds grown-up like paying taxes and taking out a mortgage, that’s because it is. Plannerhood is the more responsible way to address a writing project. It’s creating guidelines for yourself, scripting the experience, and then reading the script to conclusion. Snooze.

But here’s the thing: planning is NOT writing and it’s not even as dynamic as strategy. Strategy is “how can we win?” and strategy gives you the creativity you’re looking for without full-on-pantsing.

Let’s talk strategy for a minute. In business, Strategy is “where do we plan to play?” – this is about the field you’re planning to create on. In writing this might be genre or subgenre. Maybe that vampire novel is a fantasy romance after all? Maybe that werewolf novel is a fantasy mystery. Where are you choosing to play?

The second part of Strategy is “how do we plan to win?” – this is the unique factor of your story, what sets it apart from all the others that have come before it and how important is that factor? In business, we find these “how to win” ideas from 1) what our competitors are NOT doing, or not doing well anyway and 2) what our customers say they want.

If I take my vampire novel into the space between Katee Roberts (erotica) and Jaqueline Carey (high fantasy) I end up with Carisa Broadbent. And she’s great and I’d love to live in that space. But can I win there?

Moreover is the advice “write the novel you were meant to write” and the one “only you can write.”

So where does that leave me in the details of this vampire novel? We can discuss. Do we need all this self-reflection before NaNo? Probably not. Is this self actualization taking away from simply writing the book? Probably.

Given that planning is super boring but offers the thing we’re supposed to want to have: control, it’s become a kind of default of adult writerhood to be a planner.

Benefits of planning (this link):

• Enhances productivity – when you know what to write, you can just sit down and do it, right? Right?
• Streamlines your creative thoughts – or kills them entirely? How do we veer off from the designated path? Or do we?
• Connect the dots – not wandering aimlessly through the language to get to the connections, but writing between the dots you’ve already connected on the outline
• Meet expectations – produce exactly what you set out to produce.