Pantsing Pros And Cons

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Pros and Cons of Both Planning and Pantsing
Pantsing – Pros
With Pantsing you can get going quicker. You just start writing or typing and you’re creating your story. It’s more spontaneous, you don’t have to follow any pre-ordained track, you just go where the story takes you. This allows you to be freer and you can experiment or just write without any thought of where the story needs to end up.
Pantsing – Cons
Unfortunately, this does mean that you can end up not knowing where you are going and end up writing yourself into a corner with no idea how to get back to the story. It also means you have to write in a linear way. Once you start, the story must continue as you are writing it. You can’t hop about from chapter to chapter, it must be …show more content…

Traditionally, the three part or three act structure was used for plays and novels but more recently this has evolved into a four part (or more) structure to alleviate the difficulty of writing the second act. This was the bulk of the play or story and has pften been seen as the hardest to accomplish. The beginning with the set up is usually fine as is the final conflict or resolution. But what should happen in the middle. To avoid this lull I tend to adopt a four part story structure which incorporates the bits and pieces of 7- and 8- part structure and rolls it all in to …show more content…

The set-up is where the background of the hero and the world they inhabit is introduced. You’re setting the scene for the rest of the novel and it should give a rough idea of the day to day life of the hero but before anything untoward has occurred. It should mention the characteristics of the hero, particularly any faults, one of which should be a failing that would initially prevent them from surviving whatever you are going to throw at them in the guise of the life-changing incident at the end of the first section.
The life-changing event must be so cataclysmic that the life of the hero is changed forever. This is the point at which the hero cannot carry on his day to day life but must go somewhere or do something to counteract it and cannot avoid it.
The first plot point is when the hero makes the decision (not that you should have left him with much choice!) to follow where the life-changing event leads and forces him to leave his everyday life behind. This is generally the end of the first section or quarter of your book, i.e. for the purposes of our example, about 15,000

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