In any writing group, sooner or later, someone asks: “Do you plot, or do you just write?” And the room splits into two camps, with the kind of passion usually saved for whether pineapple belongs on pizza.
Spoiler: both pizzas get eaten. And most people who write aren’t purely one thing, whatever they say at parties.
Plotters and pantsers
In English the two camps have names. Plotters plan the story before they write it. Pantsers fly by the seat of their pants. George R. R. Martin uses a different picture: architects and gardeners. In Spanish, people talk about writing with a map or with a compass, which is a nice way to put it too.
Plotters want to know where they’re going before they leave the house. They have the structure, the turns, sometimes every scene with its goal. When they sit down to write, they already know what has to happen, and their job is how to tell it.
Pantsers know the general direction and find the road by walking it. They start with a character, a situation or a single sentence, and let the story surprise them. If they knew everything in advance, they’ll tell you, writing it would be boring.
What each one gains, and what each one risks
Plotting buys you calm. Fewer blank-page days, fewer chapters that end in a dead end, fewer surprises halfway through like “oh, wait, the killer couldn’t have been there.” The risk: planning so much the novel never starts, or that writing it feels like copying out a clean version.
Pantsing buys you freshness. Characters do things nobody expected, including the person writing them. The risk: reaching page 200 and finding there’s no ending. Or three. Then come months of rewriting to sort it out.
Neither risk is a disaster. They’re just different. And they usually get paid for in the same place: revision.
The middle path (where most people actually live)
Here’s how Wanted: One Dragon, Sunday Plot’s sample novel, got planned. At first, this was all there was:
- The premise: Valdrago’s dragon egg is stolen and Mara, the out-of-town librarian, gets the blame.
- The ending: Mara stays in town, and so does the dragon.
- One big twist in the middle: nobody stole the egg. It hatched.
That’s enough to start writing. There’s a starting point, a place to get to and a surprise in between. Everything else (who hid the egg, why the dragon only eats Bruno’s bread, how the twins from the bar end up blocking the street in the middle of the festival) can be discovered along the way.
Some people call this writing by lighthouses: you know where the lights on the coast are, and between them you steer by eye. It’s a map full of holes. Or a compass with a few pushpins in it.
What’s your mix?
A few questions to figure it out, no personality quiz required:
- What stalls you more? If it’s the blank page, try planning a bit more. If it’s the feeling that everything’s decided and there’s nothing left to discover, plan less.
- Where did you give up last time? A lot of pantsers get lost somewhere around 30 or 40% of the way in, when the original idea runs out of steam. Knowing your midpoint and your ending helps right there.
- When do you want to do the hard thinking? Plotting is revising in advance. Pantsing is revising afterward. Pick the moment you’d rather do that work.
One more thing: your mix can change from book to book. A mystery, with its clues and alibis, usually wants more map than a character-driven novel. Mara can’t find the shell in the bakery oven unless someone decided beforehand that the egg was there.
You don’t have to pick a side to use Sunday Plot
Sunday Plot leans toward the map, no question. But it’s built so you can use it however suits you:
- You can leave gaps. Any question can be answered with “I don’t know yet”. Nothing gets blocked: you carry on with the rest and come back when you know, or when you find out by writing.
- You can go your own way. When you create a novel you choose between “Guide me step by step” and “I know what I’m doing”. The second drops you on the Structure screen, no questions asked.
- You can plan afterward. If you’re a pantser with a draft already, go to My novels and pick “I already have something written”. Sunday Plot reads the outline of your file (Markdown, Word or Scrivener) and brings in your chapters and scenes. It takes the skeleton, not the novel: for each scene it keeps only a few lines as “What happens”. From there, the checks help you spot the character who vanishes for ten chapters or the subplot that got left by the roadside.
So: compass for drafting, map for revising. That counts too.
For today
Write three things, one line each: how your novel starts, how it ends and one twist in the middle. That’s all. If you don’t know one of them, mark it “I don’t know yet” and keep going. Two out of three is already a lighthouse.
In Sunday Plot, guided mode asks almost exactly this, in this order: first the premise, then the ending (the “Where it’s heading” phase), then the pillars, “Upside Down,” the turn in the middle, among them. The rest of the map can stay blank for as long as you like.