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The reason I talk about being a pantser (a Writer who doesn’t outline) is because I wished I run across writers who talked about how to do it. The writing community generally treats anyone who doesn’t outline as:

• They don’t know what they’re doing.
• They’ll see the truth and get with the program.
• They don’t understand outlining.

With National Novel Writing Month just a month and change away, we’ll see a lot of “Do you outline or pants?” Pantsers will get a side eye for not following the rules.

Having received the side eye, I decided to tackle the misconceptions about being a pantser (the misconceptions are usually about outlining).

Misconception #1: Outlining doesn’t kill your creativity

This gets told to pantsers when they say outlining ruins the story for them. Misconceptions About Outlining Your Novel – Helping Writers Become Authors brings this up (items 2 and 3). Here’s the problem—and a source of frustration:

This is true for that author. It may not be true for someone else.

I’ve been learning a lot over the last year with my Clifton Strengths. I have six in my top ten that are Strategic strengths. Strategic likes to puzzle out the story. What does an outline do? Puzzle out the story! Why then would I write the story? I’ve already figured it out.

This is not something I understood for years. All I knew was that I tried a “pantser-friendly outlining” class years ago and destroyed a decent idea by outlining it.

But I also know I’m on the extreme end of pantsing. Some pantsers need plot points, or do an outline after a certain point. There isn’t any right or wrong in this (unless you talk to other writers on a message board).

Misconception #2: All pantser novels are a mess

I hate sweeping generalizations like this. The writer saying it is parroting what someone else said (after all, it’s not like they’ve read many pantsed novels). I believe most of this comes from developmental editors (there is one I won’t name, but he ranted about pantsers in a popular book).

Yes, some pantser books may be a mess, particularly for a writer doing their first book. You have to write and mess up to discover what skills you need to work on.

And if there are significant skill weaknesses, pantsing can make it look a lot worse. Because it takes some time to figure out how to make the pantsing work for the individual writer.

Misconception #3: Pantsers are outlining and not calling it that

This one irks me because it’s so dismissive. A well-known writer who markets outlining informed me that my first draft was my outline and my second draft was the writing. So I said, “You write an outline, then do a first draft with characterization and dialogue and you have a story. But I write a first draft with characterization and dialogue, and all I have is an outline?”

This bizarre thinking implies a variety of things, like:

• “You’re lying about how you write.”
• “You’re in denial about how you write.”
• “You don’t know what you’re doing.”

Really?

All things aside, though, I get why this comes up. These people can’t wrap themselves around how someone would write a story without doing an outline first. That’s fair. I don’t understand how someone gets a story by outlining either.

Misconception #4: There’s only one way to pants

This comes out of the Writing in the Dark crowd. The term comes from a book by Dean Wesley Smith, and discusses his method of writing. However, a lot of dedicated WITD writers have done what outliners have done: dismissed writers who don’t follow WITD exactly as described.

One lectured me as being stuck in the myths because I don’t cycle in the prescribed way, stating that I was “revising” when I wasn’t. Sometimes I wish people could see inside my head and they would see why some of these things don’t work the same for me.

In my case, I can’t reverse outline for the very reason of how I cycle. My brain makes constant connections to the different parts of the story. I might be writing Chapter 6 and my pinball machine brain lights up, telling me I need to add something to the first chapter. Going back only five hundred words—the prescribed method—meh.

I’m glad Dean wrote the book. We needed something for the pantsers, and it inspired Michael La Ronn to write one as well. But there’s still too few pantsers writing about the process (there are only about five books).

But the “rules” thinking leaves out the writers like me who cycle differently or have to outline halfway through, or just think about the story.

All of this circle to three points:

1. It’s hard to understand that someone else will have a different way of writing. Even I’ve previously had problems with this. I’d always assumed that pantsing meant absolutely no outlining. That’s not true.
2. Many of the “rules” come from someone who is marketing to us. They have to sell their system, or services. Developmental editors are marketing their services and/or books. Even Dean Wesley Smith is marketing his system. He has a workshop and a book on it; he speaks at conferences. There’s nothing wrong with marketing; however, you have to know that it’s happening.

Always, always stand up for yourself and how you write. Don’t let other people’s comments cause you to change because you thinking something is wrong with how you write. If you wonder if you should change something, think about it for a while. Let your subconscious chew it over. It might find a launch point into something different.

Because if you don’t stand up for your writing process, no one else will.