Pantsing with a Sword and a Deadline

There’s something I need to come clean about. It’s been the shadow trailing me from project to project, creeping behind every draft as I wrestle for control.

I… am a pantser.

Not in the charming, “frolic through the woods and discover wildflowers” kind of way. No. I’m the feral forest cryptid, sprinting barefoot with a horde of plot bunnies thundering behind me, ready to ambush unsuspecting readers. And truthfully? I fear my own writing process. Not because pantsing is inherently bad (it isn’t). But because it stands in direct opposition to the kind of nuanced, layered, and tightly foreshadowed series I aspire to write.

The Series Gauntlet: Why Pantsing Alone Doesn’t Work

I’m well aware of the pitfalls that await those of us who pants and dare to wander onto the battlefield of series writing. You clutch a sword in your sweaty hand, muttering, “I will not be GRRM…” while reading terrifying 2 a.m. articles about why you should never publish book one before plotting the entire series like it’s a ghost story told around the campfire of failed trilogies.

The internet writing mill might have you convinced that pantsers are just destined to write stories that don’t stack, don’t build, and definitely don’t last.

The Trial Run (aka: My First Epic Draft Spiral)

When I first started to write seriously in 2022—meaning I was writing with the explicit goal of publishing—my strategy was to plow through the first four books of a fantasy epic in about four months. Then I backtracked and started to rewrite book one.

Moved to book two and rewrote that twice.

Rewrote book three, then circled back to book one and rewrote it again.

It was, to put it mildly, time-consuming. And absolutely not sustainable long-term.

The results were fine. I ended up with a Book One that had all the delicious foreshadowing I love, which was only possible because I can write quickly. That project is the one I’m holding for trad publication. There were no deadlines, no expectations. So I could stumble along that road, doubling back as often as I wanted, and take all the time I needed.

Enter: The Nocturne Cage Dilemma

Nocturne Cage was an entirely different beast. It started as what I thought would be a standalone novella… then spiraled out from there. And this time, I had a very real deadline: get it published before Balticon 59. But my standards hadn’t changed. I still wanted a tight, well-constructed, foreshadowed narrative.

Something had to give. Because even I can’t write a trilogy in three months while simultaneously prepping Polyphonic Seduction for publication.

So, what is a chronic pantser to do? Throw my hands up and bemoan my fate? 

No. I’m a stubborn chaos gremlin—and I wasn’t about to roll over and let destiny take its course.

Becoming a Plantser: A Training Montage

Writing Polyphonic Seduction started the same as all my other projects: I pantsed it straight through, updating my editor on the new word count while imagining her white-knuckling her desk—terrified of whatever monstrosity I was about to drop in her lap.

Partway through I realized that I wasn’t just writing a novella. Which meant I had to pivot hard, and fast. We’re talking full-scale World Codex blitz, fueled by caffeine and force of will. That scramble carried me through to the end of my first draft. It was still pantsed, but with slightly more fire containment.

 Problem One: I Couldn’t Edit Without a Map

By this point, I was low-key panicking. But I was determined—and possibly a little unhinged. So, I soldiered on and forced myself to the unthinkable…

I outlined.

This felt very awkward and clunky. Breaking down my plot beats into digestible bullet points broke my entire flow process. I couldn’t even focus on a detailed outline without first having some kind of big-picture idea of where the story was going. My solution to this problem was to zoom out. I built a loose Act I, II, and III structure just to sketch out potential conflicts. Then I dove into each act in more detail, expanding where I could without smothering the draft in plot cement.

Refining the System

As a pantser, I don’t think there’s a way to fully channel that pantsing energy into an outline. Or, at least, I can’t figure out how to do it. If you’ve discovered the Elixir of Planning, by all means, leave a comment.

What I did figure out, though, was that the process felt less awkward if I wrote blocks of scene text in the present tense (I’ll circle back to that) and then shaped those blocks into an outline.

Why bother turning them into an outline at all?

Excellent question.

The answer is simple: I’m legally blind. Skimming dense blocks of text isn’t easy for me. Converting those blocks into a bullet-based outline made early development faster because I could edit and expand on individual lines instead of wading through paragraphs. From there, I followed the same iterative process I used on my epic fantasy. I rewrote the outline.

Then again.

And again.

The third version finally stuck.

But unlike the epic saga, where writing and rewriting the book took months, this time it only took a little over two weeks to lock in what I now call the spine plot—the core structural arc of the book.

Sounds Fake, But Go On

On my life, this is how I was able to churn out a publishable short novel in record time, complete with more foreshadowing than any reader is likely to catch on a first past. Because I didn’t stop at outlining Dissonant Desires (Book Two in Nocturne Cage). I also outlined the “big picture” spine plot of Book Three. And by that point? The plot bunnies were fully in charge. I may or may not have also outlined a follow-up duology I plan to publish in 2026.

And the beautiful part?

Foreshadowing in Polyphonic Seduction spans that entire five-book arc—three in the trilogy, two in the duology. Every major plot point is already in place. Yes, that does mean at least fifty percent of the lines in Polyphonic Seduction are low-key foreshadowing. No, I won’t tell you which ones.

That’s cheating.

Spine Plot vs. Heartbeat Plot

Let’s circle back to a term I dropped earlier: spine plot.

While conventional writing advice leans on terms like “A plot,” “B plot,” and “subplots,” that framework doesn’t really apply to how I design narratives. Nocturne Cage is a weird literary science experiment that would probably send trad publishing screaming into the hills. What it has instead is this:

A spine plot—the exoskeleton holding the series together.

And a heartbeat plot—the emotional arc that gives the story its soul.

My outlines don’t touch the heartbeat plot. Or at least, not in early iterations. That space is reserved for a handful of emotional beats that must happen across the series, but the nuance? That part stays unoutlined. Because the heartbeat plot is where the pantsing lives.

In Nocturne Cage, the core of that heartbeat is Mia and Isidore trying to carve out a safe haven for themselves. The interpersonal dynamics between them—and the wider supporting cast—don’t need to be outlined. They need to be inhabited.

 {note: link to the other blog post}

Why I Don’t Outline Emotional Arcs

One of my core craft tenets is that I want my characters to feel almost indistinguishable from real people. I use a framework I picked up from a social work textbook—The Handbook of Human Behavior and the Social Environment by Joe M. Schriver—which introduces the ecological perspectives that understands people as being shaped by multiple overlapping systems:  

1. Microsystem: Direct surroundings (family, work, school)

2. Mesosystem: Interactions between systems (e.g., how work affects home life)

3. Exosystem: Indirect influencers (media, laws, a parent’s job)

4. Macrosystem: Culture, societal forces, belief systems

5. Chronosystem: Time, history, personal and generational transitions

I’m not getting into my full character creation process here. The point is this: I don’t have to dig deep into my heartbeat plot (or outline my emotional arcs) because I’ve already done the foundational work. Every character is built with a fully realized internal logic model. Every arc emerges from pressure. And my World Codex (currently sitting at ~100k words) keeps me consistent with the societal structures impacting each character individually.

In short:

My characters don’t need babysitting.

All I have to do is follow the road map I’ve already built and let the logic of cause and effect unfold. It’s not important for me to know what the characters are feeling in Dissonant Desires while I’m development editing Polyphonic Seduction, because I can’t know what emotional process, they’re in until I’ve walked through the arc of the first book. That leaves me plenty of room to cozy up with my plot bunny hoard and pants to my chaotic heart’s content.

That said, I did reach a point in drafting Dissonant Desires where I had to pump the brakes and fill in some of the gaps in the heartbeat plot. For time-saving reasons, I reused my messy present-tense text blocking method and threaded them into the spine plot to identify where emotional arcs needed to line up. Dissonant Desires runs the spine plot, heartbeat plot, and several subplots all at once—and they’re in constant dialogue. I needed a zoomed-out map to keep it all from unraveling.

I learned this the hard way. One of the books in my epic saga has a similar structure, and at the time I was still using my pantsing-only rewrite method. That book? Will be 110k words when finished.

The scrap pile?

Over 350k words of discarded scenes, chapters, and false starts.

I don’t have time for that nonsense anymore.

Present Tense: My Stealth Tool

I want to circle back to this, because it turned out to be the quiet linchpin holding this MacGyver-rigged system together. And honestly? The answer isn’t even that exciting. My natural writing style is deep 3rd POV, past tense. My natural writing style is deep third person, past tense. When I slip into that mode, my brain immediately shifts into “serious writing”—the kind that wants to polish every line instead of just sketching things out. Switching to the present tense is enough of a disconnect that I can stay loose. It’s messy, to be sure. I tense slip all the time. But it doesn’t matter. The goal isn’t prose. It’s structure. And those blocks are getting turned into an outline anyway.

If you want to experiment with this method, you don’t have to use present tense. Or third person. The trick is just to write in a mode that isn’t your usual. Pick something unfamiliar enough that it stops your brain from slipping into performance mode.

You’re not writing the story. You’re scaffolding it.

Ascending to Plantser Level

This system could not have worked better for me. It let me keep my feral plot bunny army, while also crafting literary fantasy with the full spectrum of poetic imagery, symbolism, and foreshadowing.

Is this my preferred way of writing?

Not really.

For books with less complex plots, I’ll absolutely revert to my feral cryptid ways. Like anything in writing, this isn’t a one-size-fits-all-projects fix. But it does allow me to increase the range of narrative structures I can tell stories in. And that’s the point of having a well-stocked literary toolkit: to write what needs writing, with the tools that make it possible.

I don’t want my storytelling to be limited by a pantser/plotter false dichotomy. Sometimes we wear those labels like they’re personality types. But they’re not. Or, at least, they don’t have to be. You can train yourself to use new tools. You can adapt. You can grow.

Writing isn’t a destination—it’s a lifelong process of self-discovery.

So keep experimenting. Keep building your toolkit. And when you find a hack that lets you write the story you need to write?

Use it.