Have you ever been in a situation where, after painstaking planning and self-control, you’ve managed to create a neat document called “Manuscript Outline” with pretty colour-coded scenes and a very logical and sensible story structure, thank you very much?
Only to actually begin writing the story, and realise in chapter 3 that the characters are already showing signs of mutiny to your sacred plotline. By chapter five someone has broken ranks; by ten they’re all running around screaming and the plot has caught fire.
You try to desperately herd them back into The Plan, but you take one look at the insouciant smile of the main character, and you know. You have lost. The plot lines have been breached. The flood is here.
If this sounds at all familiar, fret not. You might simply be a pantser, or what they call people who write without outline, into the dark. I prefer the term “discovery writer”, because it sounds more like a noble quest into unknown lands than…whatever you’re meant to be doing with those pants.
I know – the term comes from “flying off the seat of your pants”, which still fails to quite evoke the mystique and intensity of “writing into the dark”. Pantsers/discovery writers tend to plan less and, well, discover more with a style of writing that offloads a lot of the plotting and planning to the subconscious emergence of a (hopefully) coherent story. Instead of knowing what scenes need to happen in chapters 1-5 to get to the event in chapter 6, those scenes and the event itself might be rather unknown to themselves until they actually write it. Sounds chaotic? Kind of. But if you thrive with this style, it actually doesn’t look that chaotic to you.
If you happen to tend towards this category, you’re probably also familiar with a problem very common to this species of writer: maintaining consistency. This might be the single greatest challenge faced by the style of freewheeling a story onto the page, because who is to say that this cool location you came up with in chapter 16 has anything to do with the pink walruses being bartered in chapter 23? Writing with an outline just allows you to neatly slot in every necessary detail and keep meticuous track of their interconnections in a frothing sea of story.
But there’s a problem. To many of us, that’s…
Kind of boring. Even stifling to spontaneous creativity. I personally couldn’t stand the idea of having every single scene prescribed before writing it, because what on earth would be left to write? I want to discover the journey with every surprising stroke of a brush, not painstakingly fill in colours on a numbered painting. Discovery writing is so much more fun, but like many fun things, it comes with a concomitant measure of risk. Risk that is very much worth it, but requires a bit more attention and practice to master.
The Low-Down
As is evident from numerous literary works written by self-proclaimed pantsers (Sarah J. Maas & George R. R. Martin come to mind), it’s in no way a worse method of plotting. I myself fall somewhere in the murky middle ground between Excel-obsessive and chaos gremlin, so I’ll open up the methods I personally use to keep the “discovered” sections of the story in check.
I. Write. Everything. Down.
I mean absolutely everything: what drink Timmy had at the wedding reception, what nickname the MC used for his dog in chapter 12, how far exactly the mysterious abbey is from the police station. At first glance this sounds like we’re already swinging into extreme pedant territory, but you’ll thank me when you drive down that smooth plot road with not a hole in sight. Of course, if someone’s drink order is never going to come up again and is absolutely irrelevant to the character, let it fade. But if the Irish coffee is a thing for Timmy and may even play some part in the plot, please remember it.
It’s a tiny detail, but having a character proclaim how much he loves green tea in a book about rival coffee houses, to mostly drink mocha ten chapters later, is the kind of detail that will take an observant reader right out of the story.
Readers are pretty good at spotting inconsistencies like these, and the more you have them, the worse you look. Anything from the color of a prominent house, a characteristic opinion/belief or a detail from the past wrongly rendered can siderail an otherwise immersive atmosphere. The more important something is, the more often it should show up in your notes.
This is especially important for characters and maintaining their internal consistency. Pantsing or not, a common reader complaint is characters doing things that aren’t consistent with who they’ve been shown to be earlier in the book. Often this is done for plot reasons, or because the author needs something to happen a certain way, but it’s completely neglecting a solid arc of character development. This happens more easily in discovery writing, since you can go on and on with tacking on more hobbies and interests and past history to your character, while forgetting that the things you previously established may contradict the new introductions.
To prevent glaring inconsistencies, simply write down per-chapter notes for any new or relevant things that get introduced, and also any previously introduced things that resurface. Say you have a plot with a mystery element, or want to foreshadow some big reveal. Clearly marking the place where something is mentioned allows you to easily check whether you’ve set up the reveal well enough, or whether you need to edit some things. Worse than tiny details are entire sub-plotlines left hanging, so having them clearly written down helps you remember to incorporate them consistently as you traipse into the wilds.
Example.
Chapter 1 // Zhanna has an amethyst necklace that she got from her mother.
Chapter 3 // Zhanna’s necklace is mentioned again, because it’s from a specific plot-relevant jeweller.
Chapter 5 // A friend compliments how well Zhanna’s necklace goes with her purple dress as they go to an event.
Chapter 9 // Zhanna runs into a girl with earrings eerily similar in design to her necklace.
Chapter 11 // Zhanna finds out she has a half-sister she knew nothing about!
Chapter 13 // Lo and behold, her and the amethyst earring girl turn out to be related, and were both given a part of the same jewellery set. Cue: plot threads resolving.
This is a simple example, but writing instances of the amethyst ring down like this helps you keep track of its own “character arc” and make the story logically consistent – even if the whole concept of the ring simply popped in your head out of the blue.
II. The Auto-Updating Timeline
As you move ahead in time in the story, keep track of where you’re at relative to the starting point. This is easiest to do if you simply write the current day/time at the beginning of your chapter notes. The more specific, the better: 2nd of July, two weeks later (after previous scene).
You don’t need to go into times of day unless it’s relevant to the timeline, but if you have a long sequence taking place within a few hours, that can be useful as well.
This allows you to see if the reader might need some clarification as to their orientation in time. You might know it’s two weeks after the party, but does the actual writing make that clear? If you forget to do this as you go, that’s okay. Simply run through the story and construct the calendar in post processing, but do construct it.
It’s embarrasing if the author and reader are accidentally in different timelines, or the reader gets carted across huge time gaps they didn’t realise were there until chapters later. I personally can’t stand books/movies where every single scene break requires you to do detective work to figure out which timeline we’re in now. Okay, I’m not a massive fan of timeline hopping in general, but I do enjoy it if it’s done clearly and well. As your plot events spiral on, a solid timeline is a good frame to pin them to. Now you can see whether congestion threatens your story streams, or whether everything is running smoothly.
III. Pre-Foreshadowing
I haven’t read of others doing this, so I’m curious if this is a common phenomena among discovery writers: pre-foreshadowing your own foreshadowing in your notes. Basically this means that whenever some interesting detail pops into my head from the story subconscious, I mark it in the chapter notes with a tentative “FS?” for “foreshadowing.” Often the scene has then introduced some completely unexpected element that actually improved the story and made it richer, thus playing a bigger part later. Over time I’ve learned to recognise these potentials and already consciously process them when they appear, making their later use far more powerful. The subconscious already teems with diverse connections, so it’s your job to seize them as they surface. It’s like catching a shiny fish that jumps above the waves, lest it slip back into the depths.
This might sound vague, so here’s an example of things that tumbled onto the page and ended up being an important part of the story world later.
Example – The Silver Rings
In a fun personal story world, purely discovery written, a particular silver ring appeared among the characters. At first I didn’t think much of it – some kid had simply lost it while playing at the waterfalls, and other characters had helped him look for it. Later this ring turned out to not be the only one, but another character had a similar one, completely ubeknownst to and unrelated to the first group of characters. In the background I’m watching this unfold and realised that these rings all belong to the same origin, which has to do with the mystery at the heart of the woods, and a bygone kingdom whose relics are now infringing upon the present lives of the characters in this little village.
Same with moths. At first it was moth décor on a mysterious carriage visiting from the far South. Then white moths appeared in the protagonist’s dream. Then two other characters found moths etched on an ancient, hidden door. Naturally, moths ended up being a very important symbol and story device in the whole tale.
If I hadn’t written any of this down as it appeared, new things might have tossed aside these “revelations” of the moths and the silver rings, and the plot might simply have sprawled all around the woods instead of actually catching onto specific, interesting plot lines.
IV. The Connective Tissue
All these bits and pieces are just floating curiosities unless they’re connected to the deeper red thread running through the story. It doesn’t matter how many things you write down and pre-foreshadow if you end up with a book that’s the literary equivalent of a garish toy store overstuffed with every kind of plaything imaginable. Writing new things down poses another important question.
Could you simply use a pre-established thing instead?
Could the side character #5 that popped up out of nowhere also be an assistant at the office where the villain works, and maybe be combined with side character #2 that has a specific plot-relevant role?
This helps your story define itself in the same way the neural connections in a baby’s brain get pruned as they develop. The amount of connections goes down, but the ones remaining become strong and relevant to the functioning and growth of the child. If your discovery journey has taken you to 10+ locations and introduced a host of sidekicks with their own tangents, this is your chance to employ a conscious critical eye and cut the weeds to strengthen those strong, relevant connections.
It’s starting to sound a lot like planned writing, isn’t it.
Spoiler: the closer you get to the end of a book, the less space you simply have to free-wheel. All those plot threads actually have to be resolved, and the mysteries revealed, and every element you chose to incorporate must earn its place. The closer I get to the end, the more my writing follows a scene-by-scene planned structure. In-scene details I still often discover as I go, but the major beats and turning points simply need to be planned. It’s not surprising that my pace usually slows towards the end, because much of the raw imagination cedes way to the critical eye in order to make it make sense. This is not a bad thing, however.
If you’ve pantsed intelligently, the veer into plotting waters becomes a natural evolution. A perusal of your meticulous editing notes will inform what exactly needs to be resolved, what can be cut or or left for a possible later book, and what might be satisfying resolutions to strong arcs.
Hopefully these thoughts and tips helped you on your discovery writing journey, and let me know in the comments: what are your favorite strategies for maintaining consistency throughout your manuscript?
Consistent writing,
x The Foxglove Scribe
The Foxglove Scribe 