Plotting, Pantsing and Facial Reconstruction
Alis Hawkins
Plotter or pantser? It’s the question all crime writers get asked. Do you plot your books out in advance or let them develop from the germ of an idea?
Both author types exist on a spectrum, of course, like most things. Plotters range from those who plan out a rough story arc with the main plot points for each of the classic three acts, including the book’s ending, the perpetrator and his/her motives, to those who work up detailed treatments with outlines for each chapter, which can number fifty pages or more. For the latter crew it’s always seemed to me that writing the final book must be more like colouring in the outline they’ve created than anything else. That wouldn’t interest me. All the fun stuff – the twists, turns and discoveries has already been done.
Pantsers have a shorter spectrum because, at root, we’re all making it up as we go along, but some people will have certain ‘beats’ they’re aiming towards and let the rest become apparent as they go. Others will start with an as yet unidentified body and take it from there.
I’m definitely on the pantser end of things, but the truth is that, as a writer of historical crime fiction, it’s almost impossible to go full pantser. My plots are always sparked by my research and, once certain details are in my mind, they form a kind of very loose skeleton, however unclear I am on what the final story is going to look like.
It’s a bit like those facial reconstructions you see on archaeology programmes. The forensic anthropologist might start with an unpromisingly partial skull, the odd rib and a thigh bone, but by the end of the programme she’ll introduce you to a strapping, blond-haired, blue-eyed Viking warrior who looks worryingly like the bloke you see walking his dog.
My skeletal fragments are the events or ideas conjured up by my research and I construct my story around those, the other necessary bones being fabricated as I need them.
I have no real idea what the whole book is going to look like, but I know its DNA and that guides the narrative in a way I’m still not entirely clear about.
If I may continue with the reconstruction metaphor, the plotter starts with a complete skeleton to they attach muscle in draft one, followed by details of skin tone, hair colour and expressions in draft two. Whereas what I do is more piecemeal. I’ll create a fully formed head on a body which is no more than a partial spine and maybe a single foot. Then a couple of arms – muscular and sinewy with the scars of experience and skin suggesting a certain amount of exposure to the world – will appear, one by one, from shoulder to fingertips, hanging menacingly at the sides of a torso which doesn’t exist yet. Halfway through the book, once I’ve perfected the chest with just the right amount of hair and subcutaneous fat, I still won’t know whether the body has a beer belly or muffin tops, the legs will still be fragmentary at best, and I may already have lost the foot I thought I had because I’ve realised it belongs to another body.
To steer away from my increasingly tortured metaphor for a moment, this method means that I can (and several times have) end up writing a book’s penultimate chapter while still not knowing who the murderer is.
As every plotter I’ve ever spoken to tells me, it’s not a sensible way to construct a book – one fellow author flatly refused to believe me; he just couldn’t conceive of not knowing what was going to happen before he started writing. But it’s the only way that works for me. If I try to plot, everything gets leaden and my characters refuse to come to life – they just plod through the books, glancing at me sullenly and resentfully every now and then. We’re not puppets, they seem to be saying, let us do our own thing, we know what we’re doing!
But plotter or pantser, let’s be reasonable here: what’s remotely sensible about spending most of your time making things up about people who don’t exist anywhere but the shared imaginative space between you and your readers?
Not sensible, but the most fun you can have with your clothes on.
Alis’s latest release is The Skeleton Army, available from Amazon and other stores and all good bookshops.
You can read more about Alis here
Crime Cymru 