Jeremy C Kester

In keeping with the suggestion I made for myself in my post, “In The Numbers”, I am going to go over the 4 excuses that Dean Wesley Smith listed in his own article that inspired the aforementioned post.

In this post, I’ll go over the 4th excuse:

“Excuse #4… What about all the plotting and outlining and character sketches and such to get ready ahead of time. (Oh, my…seriously?)”

This is the whole planner/pantser/planster thing. Personally, I am a pantser, meaning that I write by the seat of my pants. I’d like to be more of a planster, which means that I do some planning, but I also let the writing take me where it does. The last definition of course is the first one I wrote, because I like going out of order. It is self-explanatory; a planner is a writer that plans it all out.

To me, this excuse is absolutely a non-excuse. This is one of those things that someone is throwing out there looking for anything to justify that they don’t really want to do the work. Because you either plan or you don’t, and if you do plan, it is already a part of your writing routine or you simply don’t write. I cannot think of anything more to write other than what Dean said: “Oh, my… seriously?”