pantsing – Words Deferred

The Read Report — December 2024

The final month of 2024 has come and gone. As usual, I’m reading too many books at once. As a result, I have only one to discuss for December. Luckily I have a lot to say.

Where possible, I include Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon. If any of these books pique your interest, please use those links. I’ll get a tiny commission, and you’ll support real book stores instead of longevity injections for billionaires.

The Amber Spyglass

By Philip Pullman

I finally finished reading the “His Dark Materials” trilogy with my kids. Unfortunately, the cracks in the story that were apparent in the second book caused the whole thing to fall apart in the third.

Trilogies and longer series are interesting. They are weightier than a single, self-contained book. Each book in a series needs to function at least partly on its own, while a larger arc plays out across all of them. However, readers are also willing to give the author some grace in a series; just because something is unresolved or unclear in one book doesn’t mean it won’t resolve by the end of the series. I continued reading to give Pullman a chance to make it all work.

Unfortunately, when the mysteries, confusing bits, and strange motivations don’t resolve by the end, you run into the “LOST” phenomenon (or Game of Thrones, if you prefer a more recent reference). Rabid fans can instantly sour on it due to an unsatisfying ending. All of that willingness to forgive goes away when the series ends and the problems remain. And that’s how I feel about His Dark Materials.

I usually try to avoid talking negatively about stories, books, and other media. After all, I haven’t published a successful trilogy, right? There are certainly things to criticize in my own work. That said, I think this trilogy is a showcase for a number of things that every author should try to avoid. So I will be a bit harsh on His Dark Materials, in order to better understand why it doesn’t work for me.

The Hook

Critically, I think the first book, The Golden Compass, is pretty good. In fact, I would recommend it as a book to read on its own. For what it’s worth, my kids also thought that the first book was good, while the second and third were “confusing.”

The Golden Compass introduces a main character, Lyra; the antagonist, Mrs. Coulter; the mysterious Lord Asriel (Villain? Ally?), and quite a few interesting, but less rounded characters that help Lyra on her way. Lyra has a clear quest—to rescue her friend from Mrs. Coulter—and understandable motivations. She has clear character traits, being clever and almost reflexively anti-authority, and happily willing to lie when it serves her or just seems like a good time. The setting is an alternate history Britain with a dash of steampunk sensibility, where everyone has their own soul-bound animal companion. It manages to feel both fresh and familiar.

Lyra sets out on her quest, collects allies, learns about the world, and makes a number of choices (both good and bad) in her efforts to rescue her friend. It’s a well-worn story arc, but that’s because it works.

The book is not without its weaknesses, as Lyra overcomes most challenges a little too easily and practically every secondary character she encounters quickly vows to help her even at the cost of life and limb.

The story ultimately ends in tragedy, as Lyra goes to the ends of the earth only to fail at the last moment. This also resolves that open question of whether Asriel is villain or good guy. The result is a satisfying resolution to this book—the end of Lyra’s quest—while providing an open question that leads us into the next two books: just what is Asriel up to?

Book Two Problems

The second book, The Subtle Knife, immediately steps away from the setting of the first book, and introduces a new main character: Will Parry. Lyra soon follows, but her agency in this book is so diminished that she’s practically a secondary character. It’s jarring. Even more problematic is that neither Will nor Lyra have very clear motivations or goals.

The children certainly both have problems, but neither of them have plans to try and resolve them. They go from place to place, exploring a brand new world and facing its dangers, but this meandering doesn’t have the sense of going anywhere purposeful. They acquire the namesake of the book, the Subtle Knife, completely by accident.

Mrs. Coulter is back as the villain. New characters are introduced, both allies and enemies, but this also seems haphazard. Characters from the first book reappear, but they feel as though they are pushed into their necessary positions by deus ex machina, strictly to perform actions and say words that advance the plot.

This book ups the stakes by killing off two characters, but the emotional sting is blunted by how absurd these deaths are. One character dies at the hands of someone barely seen, for a silly reason mentioned once in passing. The other dies nobly, to protect Lyra, but only because he completely forgot that he had a “get out of jail free” card that was inconvenient to the plot.

The book ends in what ought to be a cliffhanger. Lyra has been captured by villainous forces, and separated from this book’s protagonist, Will. Will has just lost the father he wasn’t even sure was alive, and decides (like most everyone else in the series) that he must help and protect Lyra.

Then, suddenly, some angels appear.

A Limp Ending

This is how we arrive at the third book, The Amber Spyglass. It’s nearly as long as the first two books combined, and it has a lot of explaining to do.

This book contains most of the anti-religious sentiment and outright blasphemy that has made Pullman so hated by Christian groups, and it’s unfortunate that his vitriol ends up channeled into decidedly bland villains with no redeeming characteristics and no desires beyond total power. Heaven is ruled by a powerful angel with a lust for control, and he sends the armies of angels and human believers across many different worlds to do his bidding, which mostly involves killing everyone who doesn’t fall in line.

This leaves us with three villains. The book implies a change of heart for Mrs. Coulter and Azriel, but they’ve done nothing to earn it. In the most perplexing twist of them all, these three supposedly mismatched villains end up in a brawl and fall into an abyss together. It’s not even the climax of the story—the book continues for more than a hundred pages afterward. The supposed protagonists, Will and Lyra, aren’t present for the fight, and have nothing to do with it.

Since the story can’t wrap up with a final battle between good and evil, or the characters overcoming some major challenge, it instead ends with heartbreak. It turns out our protagonists are in love, but they can’t be together. Pullman does a pretty good job dropping hints about Will and Lyra’s feelings for one another, even if it’s not very subtle. But the reasons why they can’t be together feel flimsy, at best. Pullman must have thought so too, because he spends a significant number of pages on the characters coming up with all the reasons why they have to end up apart.

Maybe I’m a jaded old guy, but this conclusion of love lost didn’t tug very hard at my heartstrings. How tragic can it really be for someone to not end up with their middle-school sweetheart? It’s implied that they’ll pine away for the rest of their lives…but…why? How many of us end up with our first crush?

Lessons Learned

Know your protagonist, and set your readers’ expectations accordingly. This series sets up Lyra as the protagonist, but by the end she’s little more than a bystander. Will takes over the mantle, but even he fails to have much influence on the events of the story. Readers expect the main characters to make a difference. The arc of the story is their arc.

Plot with purpose. It doesn’t matter whether you’re an outliner or an exploratory writer, either can work. But every scene and chapter should be there for a reason. Each character should have motivations and goals. Ideally these all work together to bring the story toward a conclusion that feels inevitable without feeling forced.

Stay focused. Novels are huge projects, and trilogies are even bigger. It’s easy to go down cul-de-sacs by exploring interesting ideas or building characters that aren’t really necessary. The fantastic idea that doesn’t fit in the book is just as important to cut as a bad idea. As they say, kill your darlings (or at least save them for another story, where they belong).

What I’m Reading in January

I’m working through the massive historical epic comic, Katusha; the final Witcher book; and some sci-fi short stories. See you next month!

Word Count Isn’t Everything

After months of outlining, planning and prep, I’m now putting words on the page for Razor Mountain, but my daily word counts are pretty low. I’m only averaging a few hundred words per day. If writing were a competitive sport, you might not want me on your fantasy team*.

Writing Twitter is full of authors posting their daily wordcounts, and with November (and NaNoWriMo) right around the corner, we’re sure to be inundated with the usual strategizing as people look for ways to get their daily 1,667. Certain authors, giving advice to newbies, suggest that you’re not a proper writer if you’re not outputting a certain number of words each day or week.

In fact, a new writer would be totally reasonable to look at all of this and come to the conclusion that word count is the best measure of a good writer. The truth, as usual, is more complicated. Sometimes, word counts can be a useful tool. Sometimes they get in the way, and there are better measures we can use.

Why Do We Obsess over Word Counts?

Writing projects, especially novels, are a ton of hard work. One of the easiest ways to get through a ton of work is by breaking it down. And the best way to break down a big task is to set lots of small goals. So really, it should come as no surprise that writers are naturally drawn to word counts.

A word count gives you an exact quantification of your writing. It’s a progress bar. Factories are often evaluated by how many widgets they can pump out per day, and writers are just word factories, right? A day where you write 1,000 words must be better than a day when you write 500.

The truth is that writing isn’t just filling up a progress bar. Each word occupies a unique place in the work (even if it is the tenth instance of “the” in the chapter). You may find that ten paragraphs in a row just flow out with little effort, but a single sentence takes hours to get exactly right. You may spend ten times more effort on your first page as any subsequent page. Word counts can be a useful measurement, but they start to become a problem when complex, creative work is reduced to a mere number.

When Are Word Counts Useful?

Let’s not completely malign word counts. They can be a powerful motivator. I’ve certainly fought the feeling of not wanting to write any more by telling myself that I just have to finish another 100 or 200 or 500 more words. Breaking down big tasks into little goals is useful, and sometimes a word count is a quick and easy goal to set. Even more important: the feeling of satisfaction when that word count goal is completed often feels better than the mere feeling of having written “some”. It’s a quirk of the human brain that measurement results in more satisfaction.

First drafts are the best time to use word count goals. This is the magical time when a story transforms from ideas into actual words. It’s the most writingful part of writing, and the time when generating lots of words is the most useful time to measure your word-making speed. For planners, it’s the time when the story takes shape. For exploratory writers (a.k.a. “pantsers”), this is the time to discover what the story is. Since exploratory writers may end up throwing away more words and rewriting more heavily once they know the shape of the story, word counts are often going to mean a little less for them. Still, words = progress at this stage.

Finally, word counts are important for publishing. Most outlets that publish short fiction have word count requirements for what they will publish. These can be hard requirements (“nothing over 5000 words”) or limitations that make it harder (“we publish fifty short stories, but only two novellas per year”).

Genres also have expected word counts. Your high fantasy novel may be 200,000 words and everyone will yell “huzzah,” but you might have a hard time selling a cozy mystery at half that length. This is especially important if you’re trying to get a literary agent and/or sell to traditional publishers. Even when self-publishing, readers of particular genres have expectations. There will always be books and stories that break these conventions, but it’s going to be a harder road, and it’s good to be aware of that.

When Are Word Counts a Problem?

While word counts can be useful as motivators, they can also be demotivating. Many prospective novelists who struggle with NaNoWriMo will know the pain of visiting the forums and seeing others posting word counts far above the curve. Authors who have spent years on a book may cringe when they notice a popular series writer putting out multiple books per year.

The problem here isn’t low wordcounts. It’s the soul-crushing pastime of comparing yourself to others. There will always be writers who are faster and more prolific. Of course, they all have their own struggles in life, but we know nothing about them, while being intimately familiar with our own. Amazingly, even in this age of social media, most of us make this mistake from time to time. We compare what we know of our own lives to what little we see of others, from the outside, looking in.
Even when we focus on our own writing, there are times in the process when word count just doesn’t mean much. For example, when doing research, or revising drafts.

Planners usually do a lot of research up-front. Exploratory writers may wait until they have a working draft and have a better idea what the story is about. Either way, a very productive research session may only produce a sentence or two in fiction output. In these cases, it may be better to write down a list of questions you’re trying to answer. This can act as a checklist, and a way to measure how much you’re getting done.

When a draft is done, and the remaining work is to revise, edit, and polish, word counts are at their most misleading. This often involves cutting words, rearranging, or adjusting a particular sentence until it sounds exactly right. Don’t rely on word counts as a measure here. Instead, consider tracking what you need to revise scene-by-scene or chapter by chapter. Many writers also gather feedback, make a checklist of things to improve, and then make a revision pass through the whole story for each one particular issue at a time.

There’s No Measure for Quality

No matter what measures you choose at different stages of the writing process, there will come a point where they fall short. There is no quantitative way to measure how good the writing is. It’s purely a matter of taste.

Quality is in the eye of the beholder. You may choose to take feedback from those you trust, but you are the arbiter of your own writing quality. You have to decide when you’re satisfied. Is it worth it to spend years writing and revising a single work? Or is it time to say “good enough” and move on to something new? There are Stephen Kings in the world, and there are Harper Lees, and a huge spectrum between.

To Count or Not to Count?

Goals are good — they help us plan and judge how well we’re executing. But goals don’t have to be word counts. Think about what you’re actually trying to accomplish, and set your goals accordingly. Use word counts for early drafts, where they’re a better indicator of progress. Use them as little motivators, and as guidelines for your chosen genre and/or publishing path.

Avoid the temptation to compare yourself to others, and don’t confuse quantity for quality. Understand what you’re trying to accomplish.

How do you feel about word counts? Do you see them as a motivator, or a demotivator? Do you use any other measures to decide how well your writing is going? Let me know in the comments.

Outlining vs. Exploratory Writing

It’s the classic battle of writing styles! Is it better to plan a story down to the smallest detail before you begin writing, or fly by the seat of your pants, figuring out everything as you write it?

Of course, this is a false dichotomy. If you really plan a story down to the smallest details (the actual words), then you’ve written the story. And you can’t really write a story without having some sort of starting point. But there is clearly a spectrum between extensive preparation and very little preparation.

Like so many religious wars, adherents on both “sides” have strong feelings about the right way. I’m going to talk about feelings, because there’s a strong emotional component to writing. But there are logical and structural components to writing as well, so we should consider those too.

First, let’s define our terms.

What is Outlining?

At first glance, it may seem silly to even ask, but I often find that taking the time to define something sheds light onto what I’m actually trying to accomplish. Let’s take a crack at it.

An outline is a recipe for a story. In software development, we would call it an algorithm. It describes the story by breaking it down into small, ordered ideas.

A recipe has a limited level of detail, but different recipes might be more or less specific. They will probably tell you a temperature to preheat the oven, but they probably won’t tell you to open the door to put things in, or close it afterward.

The outline of a story has many more axes along which it can be more or less detailed. It could describe the plot of a novel in a few paragraphs, in chapter descriptions, or down to individual scenes. It could map out the emotional arcs of characters, or the flow of conversation in important dialogue. It could track the locations of characters or the web of their relationships.

In short, an outline can track many different aspects of a story, but it’s generally going to break them down in terms of the plot, and usually chapter-by-chaper or scene-by-scene. It will usually place them in chronological order (although it may be out of order in a non-linear story).

What is Exploratory Writing?

Exploratory writing starts with one or more ideas – “story seeds” or anchors that start to define what the story will be about. From there, you simply write to find out what will happen next.

Much like exploring a new land, you don’t know what’s ahead. You might try a path, only to discover that it leads to a dead-end and you have to back-track. You might also go a long way, only to turn back and see that there was a much better way you could have taken.

Exploratory writing embraces the idea of discovering what a story should be by going through the process of writing it.

The Feeling of Writing

There is an emotional, and some would say spiritual, aspect of writing. More than one author has connected the act of writing to the sculptor “discovering” the statue embedded in a block of marble.

When the words just seem to flow, it can feel like writing a story is more an act of discovery than a work of skilled craftsmanship. The story seems to already exist, somewhere out in the ether, and it’s the author’s job to snag it from thin air and pin it to the page.

Being a conduit for the power of a muse like this feels good. However, there are dangers to this brand of writerly mysticism. It rejects the agency of the author in their own story. It favors blind intuition at the expense of forethought and careful craftsmanship.

The Illusion of Discovery

People have been telling stories for thousands of years – before cities, before agriculture or writing. Human brains are built for narrative. Just as eyes will see phantom shapes when exposed to complete darkness, human mind will find stories and narratives in meaningless coincidences and mindless systems. It’s the fuel that drives everything from conspiracy theories to astrology.

In modern times, stories are more ubiquitous than ever before. There is an incredible abundance of stories across a wide variety of media. We are all inundated with narrative and steeped in stories from birth. An amazing side-effect of this media-rich environment is that it trains our writing intuition. We learn, instinctively, many of the shapes that stories can take.

Intuition is the brain’s subconscious pattern-matching system. We train our intuition by feeding in examples – in this case, stories. Unfortunately, intuition is an unconscious process. Recognizing that a particular pattern or trope “feels right” doesn’t automatically give you an understanding of why it works, or what the trade-offs might be. Analyzing those patterns and working to understand them helps us to improve, tweak, or fix the bits that don’t quite fit.

Pre-Editing and Post-Editing

Let’s assume for a moment that all good stories need revision. I’m going to write a first draft, and if I rewrite it several times, it will be better in some way after each revision.

In my personal experience, when I write without an outline, I end up with a rough first draft. I’m discovering what the story is about as I write it, so it’s meandering. It starts down a path, then veers off in another direction as I find the “good stuff.” The tone of the writing sometimes changes as I try to figure out what sound matches the plot. Character and their motivations may be muddy and confused.

In this case, the revision comes after the first draft, and it’s a lot of work. A lot of things need to be cut, changed or rewritten. The cost of not following a recipe is that it may take a few attempts before you manage to cook something tasty.

If we call traditional revision and rewriting “post-story editing,” then one of the advantages of outlining is that it allows for “pre-story editing.” It’s much less effort (in terms of number of words) to write the outline than it is to write the entire story, but it forces you to do a lot of the same work – figuring out the story beats, defining character motivations and arcs, and so on. Some of the problems that would eventually be obvious after writing the story out are also obvious when looking at the outline. But the cost to fix the outline (in terms of number of words) is considerably less than the cost of rewriting those portions of the completed story.

Of course, some problems just don’t reveal themselves until you get deep into the details of the story. Even with a great outline, you’ll still have problems to resolve as you write. But there’s a balance to be struck here.

The Obligatory Razor Mountain Part

Ultimately, I want to write a good story. I want to shape it into the structure that works best for it. Razor Mountain is going to be a serial. By outlining up-front, I can make sure my mysteries have pay-offs. I can make sure I’m not painting myself into a corner. I can plan my characters’ plot arcs. I can more easily keep track of the non-linear portions of the story.

However, I also want to be open to happy accidents. I want to be able to discover things about my story and incorporate them. Having an outline doesn’t preclude this.

You might say, “How can we incorporate new ideas if we already have an outline of the story?” Well, the answer is to change the outline. The outline is a guide, a recipe. A good chef tastes the food while cooking. Maybe it turns out to need a little more seasoning here and there, and they make adjustments in the middle of the process.

The outline is the clear path. It’s a way of knowing that there’s a guaranteed line from the start of the story to the end, and it’s a good path. But you can still veer off and come back to it if you notice something scenic along the way.

Even better, an outline is a record of the challenges you faced as you first built the story, and also a list of ways you thought to solve those challenges. You might think of other ways as you write. New ideas can be plugged into an existing outline to see how well they work. Maybe the new idea causes some problems. Good! Now you know the problems you have to solve if you want to incorporate that idea. You can see the trade-offs and make informed choices.

Looking Behind the Curtain

I have been in the process of outlining Razor Mountain as I wrote these last few posts. I think it’s interesting to see how other writers work, so I may end up posting my outline and other prep materials. Since this will obviously spoil the plot of the story, I may wait until it’s done. It might also be interesting to compare the initial outline and the completed story.

Are other writers interested in this sort of peek at another writer’s process? If so, would you rather be able to see everything as it happens, or get more of a recap at the end, to avoid story spoilers? Let me know what you think.