Hello, friends!
This past week I was at Dad’s old place twice. I moved some stuff out on Friday. Pamela and I have some fragile things to pack and move on Monday, and then I’m hoping that Tuesday will bring the end to the saga of Dad’s Big Move. Just in time for work-related stuff. Ugh.
Today felt like something of a wash. I had a dentist appointment but had a bad night sleep, so spent a lot of the day tired and lethargic. I thought about bailing out of this week’s newsletter but decided that writing this would help.
I was right.
Thank you. If you’re a reader who subscribes via Substack, my website, or Patreon, your encouragement helps motivate me. I’m not breaking any records but I’m thankful to have any audience.
Welcome to the 131st installment of Gauthic Times, the newsletter about my writing, my life, and the writing pants. Um…well…you’ll see….
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I wrote about 3,400 words in Project: Moons this week. This makes the total word count around 23,400 words. That’s about 98 manuscript pages. A lot of this week’s work went by pretty smoothly. Even on days when I felt like I was struggling, the end result of the session said otherwise. I feel like I’m finally finding my way through the story.
As I said above, I haven’t don’t much else because of the ongoing Dad’s Big Move saga, but with that finally coming to an end, I should begin working on the third draft of Project: Amusement Park soon. Also, some marketing of already-written stuff.
I received a message from a bookstore friend today. Something may be coming up in the future. Stay tuned.
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If you hang around the writing internet for any length of time, you’ll learn there are two types of writers: plotters and pantsers. The idea is that a plotter uses outlines to write. They outline their story so that they know what will happen and when. They often acknowledge going off the outline when the story tells them to, but they have the confidence that they know their story and can finish it well. Pantsers, on the other hand, live in the cliché of moving by the seat of their pants. They sit down and write. They don’t know where the story is necessarily going but will find out along the way. Plotters accuse pantsers of wasting time and overwriting, pantsers accuse plotters of being rigid and maybe boring.
Most writers acknowledge that there aren’t two types of writers, that most writers will do what they need to do to tell the story they want to tell. They may consider themselves a pantser but can point out areas where outlines work, and vice versa. That said, I think most writers probably identify with one more than the other. For me, I’m definitely in the pantser category.
When I sit down to write, I often don’t have much to go on. I’m talking fiction here more than nonfiction (though I had no idea what I was going to write about today until I sat down). I’m also talking prose more than, say, a script. Which I’ll get to. When I’m working on a novel or story, I often go into it with little. I’ll usually have a concept, a main character or several, and an opening sentence. For me, I need that first line. Really, though, I prefer a first paragraph if I can get one.
The problem with pantsing your writing is that you can (and will) have false starts, especially as you’re growing into your abilities. My novel Echoes on the Pond is a great example.
When I originally was thinking about writing Echoes, I thought I’d begin with the two main characters meeting at their first therapy session. Missy is a thirteen-year-old girl who’s gotten into some trouble and is ordered by the court to see a therapist, which ends up being Cheryl, a woman whose own childhood was somewhat troublesome. Both are currently going through rough times and together, they’d be haunted by a malevolent spirit of a dead girl who wants to come back.
I got too smart for my own good, though. Under the influence of a couple of literary novels I’d read, I decided to have their stories begin earlier. A new first line/paragraph eventually came and I began writing. Missy finally meets Cheryl about 100 pages into the book. As I wrote, though, things didn’t feel right. I was at a point in the book where the story was heading toward a climax that was a letdown. I was 300 or so pages into the novel and knew I was in trouble.
When I told my friend, the artist Kim Gatesman, about it, she said, “You know what you need to do.”
I moaned. She was right.
I started over. In the new version, I began with the scene that was on page 100 of the very first version and went from there. I ended up using about 100 or so pages from that very first draft in the backstory sprinkled through the first third of the novel. Through it all, I made it up as I went. I let Cheryl and Missy live their lives. They met people and did things and, eventually, I had a massive first draft that took over a year to write and needed major editing. I had characters who weren’t needed at all and I had characters who changed midway through the story because I didn’t like how they were at the beginning. There would be major rewrites that ended up taking up almost a decade due to life and other things. My novellas Alice on the Shelf and Shadowed were published during this time. At the end, though, I had a book I was happy with.
The two adult horror novels that I refer to as Project: Monster and Project: Amusement Park, and my middle-grade space adventure trilogy, were all written the same way.
I’ll admit that had I been a plotter, the issues I had in the initial version of what would become Echoes on the Pond may have been fixed before I ever set word one paper. Or maybe not.
I had no such problems with the other books, though. Project: Monster I’ve been marketing to publishers and agents. I’ll begin working on the third draft of Project: Amusement Park soon. And I’ve marketed the middle-grade space adventure book to a degree and may resume that marketing once things settle down. Or I may try to self-publish it. I haven’t decided yet.
I like not really knowing where things will lead and being surprised when they come out. I’ve always had a good sense of story and tend to understand when the different threads need to come together.
On the other hand, what little comic book writing I’ve done, I’ve used outlines for. Because the scripts I write will be broken into the pages, etc., I try to know what will happen on each page. If I’m ever able to write comic books professionally, that may change, but for now, I like to work that way. Because I’m limited to X number of pages, I want to have an idea of what will happen when. Even then, though, if something comes up during the writing, I won’t hesitate to change the outline.
In the end, neither way is wrong or right, it’s all about what feels correct to the individual. The beauty of art is that there are no real rules.
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Gautham: Bill Gauthier.com 
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