To pants, or not to pants

 One of the arguments - mostly with myself - that I've had over the years I've been writing fiction, is: do I outline or do I write by the seat of my pants (frequently called being a 'pantser')? I've always come down on the side of being my own kind of pantser since I can't work out a plot in advance, and it's only as I write that I find (a) what the story is actually going to be about and (b) how many words I will need to abandon, how many scenes, and chapters will be cut, before I get to the point where I'm satisfied with what's on the page. 

With The Counterfeit Queen, my fourth children's fantasy, I must have written in the region of a million words before I was done. I tried counting them one day, but gave up in exhaustion. The story always had a kernel of my original idea hanging around, but the characters were different by the finish, the beginning as it now stands had nothing to do with anything I'd written in the first three or so years of drafting it, and the story was always going to have a dragon in it but I had to drag the thing in by the scruff of the neck before he let me write about him - or was it a her? (I never quite decided.) 

And then I'd read, yet again, some published writer who'd insist on an outline. But I'd insist back - to myself - just as vehemently, that you can't do an outline until you know something at least as to what the story is about. And I never really do. 

Most of these writing instructors (they're usually taking time off from writing their own novels, it seems or else writing instruction manuals on writing is more lucrative) scorn at pantsers - apart from the one who wrote a book about being a pantser. And even she seemed to have a kind of outline mentality within which her pantser persona managed to work. But she was nice to me when I wrote to her...

Anyway, all this by way of a long introduction to the fact that I just came across a review that I wrote back in 2021 on Kit Reed's Mastering Fiction Writing. (The book itself had been written in 1991.) In it I wrote: 

...probably her best chapter, which comes early in the book, rather than later, as is so often the case, is on rewriting, though she’s a writer who tends to rewrite from the word go, rather than setting down a whole draft and then rewriting. Still she doesn’t care which way you do it, as long as you do it. She feels that you learn what the story is as you write and rewrite, and as more depth is added to the layers in the story. She says that when a book is finished you can see how things plotted out, but often that’s not something that can be seen in advance. She hasn’t got anything against outlines, as long as you realise they’re not the story set down in concrete, and may have to be adjusted frequently.

Sounds like she was a writer after my own heart.