Pantsters Exposed

First of all, wish this Pantster a happy birthday! I'm celebrating by going to work as usual, so your comments will certainly brighten my day.

If you missed my post yesterday on Plotters, click here. I think you'll be surprised at how similar writing habits actually are between the two. Below is the breakdown for Pantsters:

Once again, I got very close percentages to 100 for each dichotomy presented in questions 1-4.

1a. You are not a list maker (groceries, to-do, etc)			21%
1b. You ARE a list maker			76%
2a. You do not have a set/defined writing time and/or stick to it			77%
2b. You DO have a set/defined writing time and/or stick to it			16%
3a. You do not keep a calendar/schedule for work or home			34%
3b. You DO keep a calendar/schedule for work or home			61%
4a. You pant through your entire story; to do else wise would give you hives.			37%
4b. You do NOT pant through your entire story; that's for crazy people.			50%

Interesting to note how similar the lifestyle patterns are for Pantsters and Plotters. 88% of Plotters kept lists and 76% of Pantsters do the same. 19% of Plotters had a set time to write, and 16% of Pantsters do. For whatever reason, my stereotype of Plotters was that much more of them would have a set time to write since they are so much more rigorous in plotting out their story. (Does that even make sense?) Almost the exact same percentage of Pantsters keeps a calendar, just like Plotters.

So my overall conclusions are that writers are just a conscientious bunch of people in general. I believe this has something to do with how much of our life is consumed with writing, so we have to be very careful to budget our time, regardless of whether we plot or pant. At least, this is my educated guess.

Question 4 was interesting. Only 87% answered it one way or the other, so I don't know about the other 13%, but 37% go for broke and pant the entire way through their story. Only 45% of Plotters plot their way through the entire story...not that far from each other. So these are the folks that make up the far right and far left of the writing bell curve.

On to the more random questions...

5. You have always been a pantster.			62%
6. You bought plotting books, but had nervous breakdowns before finishing them.			43%
7. Your first draft is your outline. You then do extensive editing/cutting/starting over.			50%
8. Your efforts to plot fall flat and stifle your creativity.			49%
9a. You have several stories that you work on at once.			62%
9b. You only work on one story at a time.			36%

Seriously? 43% of us have suffered trying to read Story Engineering or Story or Save the Cat or The Story Within or How to Find your Story...and nearly had nervous breakdowns? If that's not a call for a support group, I don't know what is! Well, that, and the fact that one-half of us take our story when it's finished and basically rewrite it. Whew.

49% agreed that plotting stifled their creativity, and it seems that Pantsters are more open-minded in general about how many projects we take on. The statistics were almost exactly opposite for Pantsters and Plotters with this last question. While 36% of Pantsters only work on one story at a time, 39% of Plotters work on more than one story at a time. That's fascinating, writer friends!

Q4U: Pantsters, how does this float your boat? Should we rally for a support group? I think the ACFW conference workshop got us off to a great start....