Pantsing My Way Through

Early last spring, my editor called and the conversation went something like this:

"Hey, can you send me a synop of the mss you're working on?"

Silence and the whispering of the wind on my end.

HER: Hello, P, you still there?

ME: Un-huh. Whew, for a minute there I thought you asked me for a synopsis. (nervous laugh)

Confused silence on her end then "Uhh...yeah, I did."

ME: A synopsis, synopsis? The kind where I summarize the entire book for you synopsis?

HER: Yes, unless you know of a new definition. Is that going to be a problem? I thought you were currently in the middle of writing it now?

ME: I am...but I have no idea...I mean, yeah so when do you need it?

I'm fairly certain she thought I was a complete loon. Or, that she was talking to an alien who was occupying my body and using my voice.

A synopsis is a basic writing tool. Everyone uses them. Come on, it's cool.

Except, I am a complete and total pantster. Not just, oh I have a loose outline all "up here" in my head and I'm following it along. No, no. When I do something, I do it all the way. I'm a pantster as in - I don't know what's going to happen in the next chapter until I sit down and write it!

Seriously.

My scenes often come to me out of order. When they do, I work backwards from there. Other times they come in total order and I get on a hot streak really seeing the story. But I haven't been able to write a synopsis for a book (before it's finished) since my first.

Now, luckily, when my editor requested that synop it was April and she didn't need it until June. Well the book was done by then. So I finished the book, wrote the synop and sent her both in a nice tidy email.

Am I a freak of nature?

Does anyone else out there do this?

It's scary as hell to be a seat-of-the-pants writer. But understand, I didn't choose to write this way. I've tried outlines. I've even written a complete one, once or twice. But never has my story ever stayed on the path of the outline. Sometimes its strays so far as to make you wonder if I might not have been smoking crack when I wrote it.

Just seems, when I write, the story progresses as I'm writing. There are still scenes, dialogue etc...that I have to come back and fix. Not saying the story flows perfectly instantly. But direction wise, once I put it out there, it's fairly fixed.

There are plenty of pros and cons to this style. But the one con is self-editing major revisions. It's near impossible.

I have this manuscript I wrote two years ago. I loved the story. But my agent saw some issues and asked me to fix them. It would have involved changing the POV from three characters down to two. Well because the story was written organically (which is what I prefer to call pantsing) going back to fix it was akin to watching a show like Lost mid-season. Huh? Who did what now and why?

The characters and their motivations were foreign to me. After two years of trying to fix it, I decided to start the daggone thing over, a few weeks ago. The existing story felt like white noise and clutter.

So, to my editor, I actually do know what a synop is...but if I give you one too early you'll look at the finished mss like, "Okay, now what happened to the flying cow and the magic pen you mentioned in the synop?"