To answer your first question: no, pantsing in writing does not mean pulling down the pants of a story an exposing all their private metaphors and symbolism.
Pantsing means writing by the seat of your pants, not knowing what will come next. Its opposite is outlining, which is when you know exactly what will happen next in your story because you created an outline beforehand.
Is one strategy better than the other? Let’s find out!
Imagine a story that has one of the coolest hooks you’ve ever heard of: the devil brings someone back to life, but they’re haunted by the vengeful spirit of someone they accidentally killed in a car accident. If they can survive the spirit’s attacks for seven nights, then they get to return to their body.
Sounds pretty interesting, huh? Well, that’s the premise of one viewer’s story… except they started writing it and ran out of steam. Now their story is on life support!
Thankfully that’s where the Story Surgeon comes in, ready to operate!
For the last stream’s exercise, we did something we haven’t done since Rubbish to Published: talk about how to outline a story.
Creating an outline can be a very helpful guide, like having a map for a roadtrip. And they don’t have to be intimidating to create either.
All we did to create our story’s outline was answer five simple questions. Chat voted for how we answered them along the way, and I think we ended up outlining a cool story.
Here’s what we came up with: (along with examples in italics)
Last stream we continued our Rubbish to Published series, where we start from absolutely nothing and create something “publishable.”
We did our query letter in the previous stream, so this time we took the next step: plotting chapter by chapter.
For this one, we looked back over everything we’ve created thus far, picked out the best/important bits, and laid them out chronologically chapter by chapter. We also filled in the gaps by adding new plot points.
Thanks to all our hard work up until now, it was surprisingly easy! You can see what we came up with here:
Last stream we continued our Rubbish to Published series, where we start from absolutely nothing and create something “publishable.”
We created character profiles in the previous stream, so this time we took the next step: outlining.
To do this, all we had to do was ask five easy questions about our plot:
