Can Pantsing be Taught?

If you sometimes have an urge to just throw off the reins and let your writing run wild, I have good news for you!

Hey y’all, it’s KimBoo! I’m an author and a podcaster who is also a librarian, text technology historian, and former I.T. project manager. I write about a lot of interesting things, I hope you agree! Please consider supporting me (and my dog!) so I can keep throwing errata & etcetera into the Scriptorium!

---

I start my book By the Seat of Your Pants: Secrets of Discovery Writing by explaining the reason I wrote the damn thing: a friend asked me to teach him how to be a pantser.

It was a question that haunted me, and as I recount it, led directly to my decision to write a guide book explaining how to be a pantser.

That was the plan, anyway. 

 However, not long into edits, I did a full “find-replace” and took out the word “pantser.” It shows up in a few places in the final, published version, but rarely, and usually in scare-quotes just like I’ve used it here.

The reason was because I realized that I could not teach someone how to be a “pantser” any more than I could teach someone how to be left-handed. As a left-handed person, my response to that request would be “No! You are either left-handed or you aren’t!”

Which is true, but also isn’t helpful. You can learn to use your non-dominant hand, if you want to. There are plenty of people who have lost limbs and learned how to use non-dominant limbs to walk, type, and live. It’s entirely possible to switch it up, whatever your motivation to do so!

But if I had to learn how to use my right hand for everything, I’d still be “a left-handed person,” whether I still have that hand or not.

Furthermore, there are plenty of people who fall on a spectrum of ambidexterity. Including me, come to think of it; my right eye is dominant, for instance, and I can use a mouse with either hand seamlessly.

The problem with boxes is that humans are never that neat and tidy to just sit quietly inside of them.

As I started writing the book (and pantsing it, as I always do!) it was clear to me that being a pantser is more than just a natural inclination. Whereas “pantsing” is often described as being completely lawless, I knew    from my many discussions about craft with other pantsers that we shared approaches that represented a whole spectrum of discovery writing techniques.

That right there was the breakthrough moment:

• “Pantser” is an identity;

• Discovery writing is a technique.

I realized that I wanted to write a book that wasn’t just for pantsers. I made it my goal to share those techniques with writers who might benefit, whether they consider themselves pantsers or not.

I took out the word “pantser” from my book because I wanted to make it clear that the techniques I am talking about are available to all writers, whether they feel the call to be a planner, a plantser, or a pantser.

There is no need to slice and dice our personal identities in order to share what we do, how we do it, and why it works for us.

After all, many pantsers I know use outlines! They use them later, when they have already written something (reverse outlining), but they do use them.

Likewise, many planners I know often talk about getting “in the zone,” writing without being constrained by self-awareness. They are practicing discovery writing even though they are doing it with the guardrails of an outline supporting them.

We are more alike than we are different, when it comes down to it. No, I can’t teach someone how to be a pantser, but I’ve written a whole book on how people can incorporate the techniques that I, and many other pantsers, have used.

That said, I think there are probably a lot more pantser-aligned authors out there than people know about. Since discovery writing has been discouraged and denigrated for so long, many authors have sat on their nefarious pantser urges, like kids of old were taught to sit on their left hand in order not to use it for anything (true story, as related to me by my mother, who was forced to use her right hand).

They don’t trust their instincts or intuition, they feel like failures because they can’t stick to an outline, and they are frustrated whenever their creativity doesn’t take that left turn at Albuquerque.

But the truth is that they are not broken. They aren’t failures and they aren’t doing things wrong. Usually, they are fighting their own inclinations all the way down. While they may not ever consider themselves “a pantser,” they can and should learn how to lean into discovery writing techniques.

You never know where they will take you, and that’s the whole damn point!