Yes, I talked about it last month, but I was thinking again about the term “pantser” being used for a writer who does not have a solid outline in advance of writing. Many authors seem to embrace that term, but it’s always rubbed me the wrong way. I think I figured out another reason why I don’t like it.

The more I think about it, the more I think that I don’t exactly write by the seat of my pants. Fine, okay, I can’t stick to an outline that I write in advance. But no, it’s not because I love everything to be chaos and can only work by improvising.

I feel like if you’re writing by the seat of your pants, you’re making stuff up as you go along. Various definitions say it’s working by using your own experience, or deciding as you go along, but I don’t see any implication that it’s a patchwork method or that you have a basic idea and revise it weeks/months/years later. (Certainly, pilots “flying by the seat of their pants” don’t have the luxury of revising their flight path months later!)

For me, I feel like there IS a story somewhere out there. But I only catch glimpses of it, as if I’m looking through a tiny window. As time goes on, I start to piece together more of the story, but parts of it remain hidden from view until rather late in the process. (I feel like life works that way, too!)

That’s why I think the term “discovery writer” is a much better fit for me than “pantser”. To me, much of the joy of writing comes in discovering things about the story during the months and years that I work on a story. That probably explains why I don’t really enjoy writing first drafts but do kind of enjoy making massive edits once I have a better idea of what the story “really” is.

When I put my last novel through a critique group, I’d been working on it for several years (!) so I could hammer down the story and characters and edit it into some semblance of order. But soon I’m going to have to submit the first part of a novel that hasn’t even been fully written.

My poor critique group…!