Are you a plotter or a pantser?
The arts of writing a novel apply in real life, too
Hello,
Just a quick one today as I’m deep in studying and some very exciting story-coaching work with clients.
If you check in with yourself right now, do you have a body sense of the story you’re living? Are you walking round with a certainty in your chest or your gut that you’re finding your way to firmer ground—or alternatively, that everything might crumble anytime? That things are opening or closing?
Personally, I’ve had the sense for a few years now that I’m in a (maybe the) great hinge of my life. That I’ve been navigating an era of first collapse, then deep uncertainty—but that there’s solid ground ahead. In fact, in the last few months, I’ve had my first inkling that I might finally be swimming up to that solid shore.
It’s strange how even a couple of years ago, when I had no idea which continent I was going to live on, let alone what the life I built there would look like, I still had this felt sense of a descent into the underworld that would, someday, spit me up onto firm ground.
I’ve been noticing, in my work with clients and in my life, how much of an art there is to holding this sense of story, of momentum and onwards energy, while also fully embracing the rich and intricate texture of the day-to-day. It’s too easy to let your sense of the story’s future override the sensory experience of it in the now; or to end up lost or disoriented because you’re swimming so deeply in the day that you lose sight of the years.
Novelists often divide themselves into plotters—those who plan out their novels in advance—and pantsers: those who feel their way forward intuitively, writing by the seat of their pants. The same division sometimes seems to apply in life itself. Do you have a five-year plan? Or are you taking the days as they come and following your bliss?
But as with all binaries, this is an over-simplification. Stephen King famously said that plot is “the good writer’s last resort and the dullard’s first choice.” Easy to say if you happen to be Stephen King, born with perhaps one of the strongest felt senses of the contours and energy of story the world has ever seen.
For the rest of us, there’s a lot to be said for being intentional about balancing a sense of story with a sense of now. In my work with clients, we often establish the arc, the shape of a story—then put it aside entirely, in order to encounter the characters on their own terms and let them breathe on the page. It’s a both/and tactic that allows for richness on multiple levels.
In my life, this practice looks like allowing myself to feel the loneliness and the longing for connection, the joys and the doubts of each day, even as in my gut I sense that there’s solid ground ahead.
What would it look like in your life?
Love,
xx Ellie