RIDING A WILD STALION

 

Having just completed the fourth draft of my work in progress (=WIP) and with two beta readers’ feedback to help navigate the last two drafts, I can now assess what an anomaly this current WIP has been.

 

I was never a true planner. I have a writing friend, a published novelist, who not only fully charts all the details, plot points and characters of her stories before she begins typing the first paragraph, but if she finds that her writing has so much as begun to stray off the planned course, she deletes those pages and gets back on the road she had marked.

 

I can’t imagine writing this way. Too much like the homework back in school days: I know I must do it, I have a feeling of satisfaction when it’s done, but the work itself is torture, if you find extreme tedium torturous.

 

I know two writers who are complete pansters, (=writing by the seat of their pants) no plan whatsoever. They sit down to a writing session with no idea what will appear on the screen/page. Stephen King claims to be one. He sits to write in order to find out what will happen next. This is successful only for those who have so ingrained story structure in their creative mind that it turns out brilliantly, or at least not a complete going-nowhere-mess.

Panstering is very much like a flying trapeze without a safety net.

 

I had attempted this once a few years back and gave up after the first chapter. I then sat down to make a rough chart and proceeded as I usually do. I follow the chart loosely, discovering some surprises along the way but basically staying the charted course. Some call this “discovery writing.” It’s a plan that is not detailed, and the details are spontaneous and immensely enjoyable parts of the process.

 

I started my current WIP this way. But this time, right after the first chapter, the story went its own way. I had so completely lost control of this galloping horse that I didn’t stop to glance at my charted plan. What was happening on the page bore little resemblance to my plan.

 

It was as if I attached the reigns of a trusted old workhorse to a carriage. Once we left the carriage house, the horse began to gallop. To my horror, I discovered it was not the horse I thought I had attached, but a wild stallion. I was driving a carriage that a young wild horse I'd never met before had taken over. I had no control.

 

I’d start every writing session dreading where it was going. I had no idea where it would end.

 

Well, it did end. A second draft surprised me, because it sort of held together.

 

What’s next? Who knows. But it’s been an experience.