Finding My Drafting "Process"
Experienced writers have often said that "you only learn to write the book you're writing." That no matter how many books you finish, drafting doesn't get easier, or at least not substantially so, because each book is different. I'm finding that that's truly the case, given my last few projects.
The draft for The Sleepless was completely pantsed, since I did it during NaNoWriMo. Before each writing session, I had a rough idea of what I was going to write, but never put it down in an outline form. I didn't know how the story would end, let alone each chapter. My process for my day job doesn't allow for doing things on the fly, pantsing a fiction draft felt freeing.
When I was pantsing, I had a tiny notebook where I’d scribble my ideas, and that was it.
Upward was the complete opposite. I guess the tedium of cleaning up and revising and reverse engineering a pantsed draft really wore me down, and so the draft for that next project was completely, meticulously planned. The outlines were long and detailed, and each act and chapter were structured before I put down a single word to paper.
At the risk of sounding like Goldilocks, plotting wasn't clicking for me either. The draft was clean, and it was a lot easier to revise (and got sent out for beta reads quicker), but I lost that sense of immediate discovery and possibility that comes with pantsing.
Plotting requires a lot of supplies: post-its and highlighters and lists and spreadsheets...
The project I'm currently working on now, Generations, is a whole different animal together. It's a frame story, so it has discrete segments that let me feel out a better process for each one. Several stories are pantsed (drafted during the last NaNoWrimo event), some stories are outlined.
There's also variability even among the parts that are outlined: I've tried outlining the traditional way, and using a variant of the 10x10 technique; I've used the seven-part structure in one story, and the four-act in another.
Because of the structure I picked for this draft, I get to find my process for this book in particular and for each story. I'm sure I have a lot of revising ahead of me--trying to make sure the parts are a coherent whole, that there's not a lot of unevenness as one reads through the different stories--but I'm really enjoying feeling my way through this one.
As with any writing "rule" I don't think there's one true way. Every writer writes differently, and even for myself, I'm finding there isn't one way between projects. Depending on the story, it might lend itself more to plotting or pantsing or a mix of both. Does having no preferred method make the learning curve tougher for me? Maybe, but no one said any of this was going to be easy.