What Kind of Writer Are You?
30 Day Screenplay: Day 3 — January 4th, 2022
This post is a part of a series, see the first post here.
“Didn’t get any pages”
I guess the disappointment of the day before carried over a bit because I did not get any actual pages. But I did do things, in a way to counteract the emotional motivational problems that I isolated.
“but read practically all of Steven King’s On Writing.
He seems to be against outlining, but pro using theme to get through writer’s block. I still like outlining but making sure your character and situation are strong is very helpful. It’s also good to remember that I can just write bad stuff to try to get to the next spot I know, maybe finding something good along the way.”
This is a good time to talk about outlining in general.
If you read posts by writers for a writer audience, you hear the terms pantser and plotter. Pantser is short for “by the seat of your pants”. King is a pantser, it seems for the romance of it he says outlining is “the good writer’s last resort and the dullard’s first choice. The story which results from it is apt to feel artificial and labored. (On Writing)”
A plotter is someone who leans into the outline, usually for the more practical purpose of getting writers block less. I would consider myself a plotter, but I also don’t really think that the two are mutually exclusive. I see it more as a spectrum of combinations. 100% plotter 0% pantser on one side to 100% pantser 0% plotter on the other.
I don’t think either extreme is really possible, but you can have a strong tendency. King is heavy on the pants way, apparently not even taking notes, but still admits to starting with a character and a situation firmly in his mind. On the heavy plotting side, you have something like the snowflake method which I think is very cool. Even then, eventually you have to let go and work on the scenes.
At this point, I’d outlined both days and written only once. Yet, I said on day 2, outlining doesn’t help at the scene level until there is a lot of it. I knew one or two plot points of the scene, but before I wrote those two pages I didn’t have any idea how I was going to get there. I didn’t know what other scene-level plot points there would be. I also didn’t know how to end it.
So yeah, both methods are happening in tandem. I suspect any individual will have to find their balance on any particular project.
Still 3/120
