I am currently in the process of writing my third book (actually sixth if I count a very early effort at 19, a scrapped novel when I was querying, and another novel that went to 35k last year but that I had to abandon), and I think at this point I have finally understood where I am exactly on the Pantser–Plotter spectrum.

I think I am… both? As I’ve tried to streamline my process recently when explaining how I write to a friend, I realised I end up incorporating both writing processes into every book. It’s honestly very time-consuming (cries in 10 drafts), but personally it’s just what accommodates the way my brain works and processes plot and character-building—and it also leads to some of the most satisfying moments I’ve had since I began writing professionally. So let’s take a look.

The Concept

This one took a while to get to, I’m not going to lie. My perception of what a “pitch” or a high concept is has changed drastically since 2023; what I thought was a pitch back then makes me laugh now. I feel like I have finally grasped what it’s like to write a story around a high concept so that it then translates into a punchy one-line pitch. This, along with absolutely vague vibes of the story setting (which is important in fantasy), is what I start with.

For instance, I started writing TRUTHTELLER out of the note on my phone pictured above (no clue what happened to the “birds made of paper with letters” or what that was even supposed to mean). This note, in itself, isn’t a pitch, but it was one concept or element that I started off with and then built the pitch around. It was the novelty factor, the element that made me excited about exploring. Everything else came after that.

The Discovery Draft

From this moment on, I have no idea what the hell I’m doing. My first draft is always terrifying and exciting. I don’t know where I’m going. I’m going blind. I don’t know who these characters are or what they want to do. I’m aware of the high concept/pitch that should tie every single on-the-spur decision together, but the scenes, dialogue, and relationships play out on paper without previous planning. It’s incredibly chaotic. It’s honestly not practical at all — especially when someone asks you at this stage what your book is about and you answer, “I don’t know yet, but I will find out.” BUT I always feel like all my best twists happen like this.

When the discovery draft is done, I now have a notion of things that I didn’t have before because my brain simply can’t “plan” a book without writing it first. However, by the end of a discovery draft I usually can:

• Identify the message I want to portray with this story
• Know what this story is actually about, and which elements need to be reinforced or stripped away
• Know which characters carry the story and which need to be ruthlessly cut
• Identify major pacing issues, discrepancies, or plot holes

I try to make these drafts shorter than my final goal word count. So for instance, if I’m aiming to submit a 100k manuscript to my agent (I write adult fantasy), I will try to make this discovery draft around 85–95k words to leave room for more.

The Outline

I will outline the book once I finally finish writing the book. Grabbing the dumpster fire I wrote before, I break it down into a spreadsheet with plot beats. I cut, copy, paste, merge chapters, merge scenes, break scenes into two, delete things, add more things, and just rearrange it all on a spreadsheet first. Any notes go here—lingering questions I have, along with things I’m not too sure about, but I always aimg at hitting the three-act structure. Lots of sacrifices are made at this stage, but I feel like the weird creative decisions that happen here, after the book is actually drafted, have a lot of power.

Now, the fun part (not) is that once I start writing according to my outline, I will still feel like some of it won’t work after I go back to my word processor. Once again, as I’m putting the words on the page, I try to go with my intuition—sometimes things just seem wrong. What I feel works perfectly well in an outline might not play out in a natural way, might seem forced, or feel like it’s there just for the sake of drama.

So even at this stage, I might end up with multiple outlines and try different options (for instance, I wrote three different Act 1s for Truthteller until I found one I was happy with). Here’s an example of one of my first outlines post-discovery draft (I didn’t go with this one) for Act 1.

So why can’t I just jump straight into this outline part? Isn’t it double the work?

Yes, it is double the work. Or triple. I’ve tried to do it the “right” way. But I can’t (cries)—it’s just not the writer I am. And maybe that’s the case for you too, and that’s the exact goal of this post to begin with.

Note: if you send a discovery draft to your agent to read, without previously disclosing that it was a discovery draft (because honestly, you won’t know at the time—you’re still a baby author and everything is very confusing), she will set up a call with you and say, “this is not a book yet.” She is right. You have sent her chaos and a concerning amount of foreshadowing with no follow-through.

Proper Draft 1

With that Type B trash of a manuscript in my hand and a perfectly polished Type A outline in the other, I will finally sit down to write my first proper draft. This means a whole new Scrivener file, then creating chapters in the binder section that translate whatever I’ve written in the outline so that I can guide myself properly. Since Scrivener allows you to have two tabs open at one time, what happens now is a whole lot of copy/pasting. I will be drafting a new book line by line, but going back to that original discovery draft and taking huge chunks of descriptions, dialogue, and scenes, adapting everything to what’s in the new, shiny outline. And yes, that means killing tons of darlings. The Scrivener trash folder is my best friend, and I can’t tell you the amount of times I go back to these cut scenes and paragraphs and end up incorporating them back in (sometimes even in a completely different manuscript!).

Subsequent Drafts

After Draft 1 is finished, that’s when the typical edits begin—first big dev edits, then line edits, then off it goes to whoever needs to read this manuscript to give it new life. Being a pantser, however, means that I need ongoing notes on my phone for each manuscript to write things that come out of the blue and that *may impact future rounds of edits.* Sometimes I dictate into my phone while I’m driving, or type down notes at 2 a.m. If I’m still drafting/editing on my own, I go back to my spreadsheet and see where/if I can incorporate those out-of-the-blue changes. If I’m editing with my agent, for instance, I’ll run those changes by her if they’re big.

I think this is already too long, so I won’t go into the “proper” editing process for subsequent drafts (how to tackle dev edits, line edits, combined dev/line edits, and what to look out for), but hopefully I’ll return to that in another post!

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xxx

Mariana

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