The Woman in the Library

Writers take many different approaches to storytelling, but approaches to writing fiction generally fall between two poles—pantsing versus plotting. Pantsers write by the seat of their pants. They value spontaneity, writing as a process of discovery of who their characters are, and following storylines wherever they go no matter how implausible that storyline may be. The pantser’s approach means that much more work may have to be done in subsequent re-writes and revisions to deal with writing problems, such as plot holes.

The fictional writer Freddie Kincaid is a pantser who spends days following her inspirations and incorporating her day-to-day life into what she writes. She compares this process to driving a bus; she acknowledges that her critical voice plays a role in what she writes, but she describes that voice as “a bus driver [who] is a shadow, a practical necessity of transport, and for now [she] disregard[s] him entirely” (38) to avoid writer’s block. At times, Freddie finds that she loses sight of what she is after in a given writing session. Pantsing also means that her writing is dependent on momentum; she neglects herself and her relationships because she fears losing momentum. Because Freddie is a pantser, she also relies on outlining after the fact to make her draft more coherent. In the book, the extensive nature of this process is symbolized by the long, accordion-like Japanese notebooks she uses for these outlines. Her writing process is far from efficient.

A second approach to writing is plotting. Plotters spend more time on the pre-writing stage to create detailed character sketches, important plot points, or even themes and motifs they’d like to touch on in their fiction. When plotters sit down to the invention stage of writing, they have a clear plan in mind and thus may be able to write more efficiently. The challenge of plotting is that it may interfere with writing as discovery, a big issue since discovery may be one of the pleasures that motivates writers to create fiction. Plotting may also produce dull, formulaic work. Cain McLeod is a plotter whose pre-writing makes his office look like a “police incident room” (39) according to Freddie, and he believes that all this planning may be a form of “procrastination” (39). Having a plot does help him when he gets writer’s block, however.

The frame narrative—the one-sided correspondence between Leo and Hannah Tigone—shows that pantsing versus plotting can be an oversimplification of what writing fiction looks like. The feedback loop between Leo’s emails and Hannah’s manuscript reflects that writers, no matter how rigorous their plotting, live in a rhetorical context that may randomly shape the choices they make. On the other hand, a pantser like Freddie still relies on genre conventions to shape the manuscript she works on throughout The Woman in the Library.