Planner Vs Pantser or How I Approach NaNoWriMo Each Year
Process? I don’t have one.
This will be my 6th attempt and hopefully my 6th win of NaNoWriMo, the annual month long challenge to write 50,000 words in 30 days.
Quick rant: The first question I always get after someone asks me about NaNo and spout off that month long challenge statement is, “How many pages is that?” Do they really think that this is an easy question? 500 words is always one page, right? Wrong. It really depends on how much dialog is used and what program it is being written on. My go to answer is simply, “It depends on how much dialog, but I usually end up with between 110 and 120 pages single spaced in Google Docs.” #endrant
Anyway, back to the point of this post. Over the past couple of years, the planners vs pantsers debate has really been growing and I find myself somewhere in the middle.
Planner: Someone who takes the time to come up with a plot and create scenes, plot twists, outlines, and character notes. None of this planning text counts towards the 50,000 words.
Pantser: Someone who writes by the seat of their pants. No outlining, no notes, no pre-NaNo planning.
To really understand, let me walk you through the past 7 years (I took one year, 2010, off):
2009: My first year. What a crazy October! I found out about NaNoWriMo on Facebook I think, or maybe it was Twitter, two weeks before November 1st. I immediately checked out the website to learn all I could about the challenge and to see how to actually participate. I joined a region and put the local write-ins in my calendar. I had no idea what to write and had little time to time about it. This year’s story ended up being about a ghost who basically traveled across the country with a fellow ghost to find her sister. Being ghosts, they could only travel at night, of course. #pantser
2011: After a terrible second half to my 2010, I took out my frustration in my novel. I had plenty of inspiration to help me write, though I did not plan out the story ahead of November. After I closed the novel on November 30th, I never went back. It was the end of a chapter in my life and very therapeutic. #pantser
2013: A made up world based loosely on Alice In Wonderland. That was the starting point for this year’s novel. I love the Alice story and thought it would be cool to try my hand at a similar plot. Thinking back to what I wrote, I wouldn’t read it. I tried to be organized this year, I really did. I had a strong opening that I wrote an outline for, an idea for a middle, and a fuzzy idea of a possible ending. #planner
2014: Driving home from Rhode Island with my boyfriend in October, he asked me what my idea was for NaNo this year. I don’t usually talk about my writing, but I was struggling with the story line and figured he would be a good person to talk it out with. Within the hour, we had a good working plot. Did the story turn out the way I had planned? Sort of. It was about a salesman who, on a business trip in New Mexico, gets lost and ends up stumbling into a facility that most people did not believe was real. #planner
2015: I had every intention of going into this year’s NaNo with a full outline. I am in love with my inspiration and have been “studying” the subject for at least a year (a.k.a. watching every episode of Ancient Aliens). But, for the life of me, I cannot figure out which way to take this story. There are so many possibilities. I think I have settled on an opening line to at least get me started, but that might change in the last 31 hours before November 1st midnight (EST). Total #pantser
I hope my fellow WriMos and I have great success this year and all of us planners, pantsers, and plansers (I just made that up) have a great month. Drink your coffee and cheers to NaNoWriMo 2015!
Want to be my buddy on NaNoWriMo.org? Here I am!
