Plotting vs Pantsing with Special Guest Sean Dare

Matt: [00:00:00] Welcome everybody to write Out Loud the podcast about writing storytelling. Authorship, putting pen to paper or keyboard as the case may be. I am joined, of course, by the usual, the mythical, the mystical, the magical. Christina.

Christina: Wow. The mythical. That's interesting. Or the mystical?

Matt: Mythical and mystical.

Christina: The mystical.

Matt: Yes. Yes.

Sean Dare: They're not mutually exclusive.

Christina: No.

Matt: They are not. And we are also joined by our friend Sean. Sean Dare. Author, writer, storyteller. Celebrity. Hello, Sean!

Christina: Yes.

Sean Dare: Hello.

Christina: And full disclosure

Sean Dare: love to know which dimension my celebrity exists

Christina: (chuckles)

Matt: is this one. is this one. good.

Christina: And just full disclosure Sean is a client of mine, but I brought him in because we're talking about something that I think he can really speak to with his own [00:01:00] experience. So.

Matt: Agreed. Yeah. We thought this would be a great topic to have our friend Sean on because we're gonna be talking about plotting versus pantsing. Now, I. I'm not entirely sure what this is. I've heard of plotting. I think it has something to do with gardening and pantsing is when you pull somebody's pants off, right?

Christina: No,

Matt: is that what we're talking about?

Sean Dare: No. You got That's it. right. End of episode. We'll see you week. Bye everybody.

Matt: Swweet.

Christina: No, no, no, no. So

Matt: 30 minutes for me trying to get through the opening of this podcast, and we wrapped in about so you know, we're good. Our job's done here.

Christina: so plotting.

Sean Dare: Sometimes it's like that, Matt, sometimes it is.

Christina: Plotting versus pantsing plotting. Is someone who figures out what's going on in their story, whether by outline by note taking by, they really delve into [00:02:00] what the book is about before they even write the first word. So an example of that is an author I used to work with wrote 50 page outlines before she started the story.

Matt: Ow 

Christina: Pantsing on the other hand, is a short term for, I'm assuming maybe, maybe it's not, maybe I'm just making this up, but flying by the seat of your pants. So, I also know an author Susan e Elizabeth Phillips, who is actually said sometimes she doesn't even know the name, names of our characters when she sits down to write the first word.

That is really pantsing.

Matt: Yeah.

Christina: Most people though, I find in my experience actually do both. They do some plotting and some pantsing. Sometimes they need to have guideposts. In order to know exactly where they're going, [00:03:00] have some sort of, guardrails. Some people absolutely have to have some mystery that they don't know about because that's actually what gets them to write more and gets them to the keyboard each day.

So what we're gonna be talking about tonight. Is simply the differences between the two. How, how you can figure out what you are how to use it to your advantage. How knowing how you write, is important so that you can, use all the different tools and use them in a way that benefits you.

Matt: Sure.

Sean Dare: Can I, can I jump in and say two things about your intro from the, from the guy that sits on the behind the keyboard? Number one, you're not plotting before you're writing. That's part of your writing it. If you're a plotter, you're, it is an instrumental piece that you're needing to, to accomplish before you can.

Write the, you [00:04:00] may, it may be before you actually start writing the words that your reader will read or you might be the words you send to your editor even. But that doesn't mean that it's not writing work and it's not writing it, it very much is. So a lot of people like to call that pre-writing work, but it's still writing work.

the other one is not only knowing how you write, but discovering. How you can write and then also being adaptable. Right. Um, the, the thing that surprised me the most was how much my reliance on the various ends of the spectrum. 'cause this is a spectrum. You're, you're, never really one, 100% or the other, or very few are, you, the, the amount of times I've floated around in this spectrum and have landed in different places during the course of writing has really amazed me. And then I'm gonna add a new thing to this whole point, which is you don't have to lock yourself in. You can find ways to introduce from both sides, [00:05:00] from both the pantsing side and from the plotting side ways to introduce parts of that into your writing style or your writing effort, your work to make it more efficient more creative, more surprising. These are all things that can be accomplished by, by just exploring a little bit of the other side. So, a very common mantra in writing is figure out how you write and write that way.

And what I'm saying is it doesn't hurt to occasionally. Step outside and take a look and see if there's something new now that you've done it for a while, that might make it better or faster or easier. So anyway,

Christina: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And in fact you hit on one of the key points is that like I said, I've often found that people actually do both. I. Don't even realize what it is they're doing. Because I think to some extent I don't know anyone who goes, I mean okay. [00:06:00] Obviously, Susan, Elizabeth Phillips, when she talked about that, that was actually very shocking to me that she didn't even know the names of her character sometimes, because I think most writers go in knowing something.

Knowing a spark of an idea. Some people just plot in their head and have to kind of know it all in their head before they even, start writing and not make an outline. It, it really is all about figuring out what works for you and leaving all the rest. I mean, this is, this is an idea of a tool that can be used a million different ways. And you don't have to do it the same each time because different stories require different things. If there is something that you're trying to do with your story an idea an allegory you name it. There are gonna be different ways [00:07:00] to come at that.

Sean Dare: Also at different points during the course of writing your story. So, here in a minute if you guys will gimme the time. I would love to just kind of recap my journey through pantsing versus plotting. 'cause I've kind gone to both ends try and ended up in the middle. But it sounded like Matt wanted to jump in and say something, so I don't wanna leave him

Matt: Oh no, I think, yeah, no, that's a good, that's a good, it's a good way for us to go and I think I can kind of talk about the way that I've done it for the majority of my time in whatever I've written. So yeah, go ahead, run yours and then, and then I'll follow up after.

Sean Dare: So I think like most naive writers I assumed that the movies and television were correct, that you just sit down and the story flows out of you, like water over a dam. And it just, it's just an amazingly beautiful cascade of, of prose that goes to the page and never needs editing, and that is a bunch of bull crap.

So the, the reality of it was, I sat down and I didn't know what I was doing and I [00:08:00] just started writing, which is very much pantsing. You, you've got an idea, a germ of a story. You kind of know an idea of where you want it to go, and you're kind of creating it up as you go along. And there are some very incredibly famous authors that you've, that you've read that write that way.

Stephen King is probably the most well known, or at least one of the most well known people that do that. But I got very frustrated with that very quickly because I kept writing myself into corners and couldn't figure out how to go anywhere. I'd get a chapter maybe or two, and I'd be like, and, and, and initially I thought, well, this story idea is terrible, and I'd just dump it and move on.

Try another one. And, and I kept blaming the story and while researching it one day online, I came across the idea of plotting taking your story and figuring out your story ahead of time. And that blew my mind. I, I'm like, well, that's a. Beautiful idea. Right? And the way it was described in the initial article that I read, it was like the, the blueprint for the building so that you knew [00:09:00] how to build the building.

You're not, you're not going in and just laying bricks hoping. It kind of turns out as a building, what you're doing is you've got a blueprint, you've got plans you can schedule when stuff needs to come in and what materials are needed and when they're needed. And my. Desire for order in life. It that really appealed to me because of that, I, I love to see order brought from the chaos of the existence that we have.

And unfortunately as I will explain momentarily, that also is bull crap. There is no order. There is only chaos and you need to embrace it. So. Uh, I then sat down and I tried to write outlines having no idea about story structure an integral part of any story and, and beware those who decide that they want to break the story structure rules because story structure rules are the pieces that allow.

The audience to follow your story easily. You can [00:10:00] break the rules. It is done, and they can be amazing when it's done right. But almost always when a, when a writer breaks the rules, if they don't know what they're doing, they just end up writing a steaming pile of prose that nobody reads and nobody cares about, and it becomes forgotten as fast as it was written.

So. The rules are in essence that certain events need to happen at certain points in your story. Your, your hero needs to join the main story at approximately 2020 5% of the way through the story. You need to have a turning point at about 50%, and again, at 75% of the way through the story, you need to have resolution arcs that start.

You need to have arcs in the story that start somewhere in the beginning or the middle, and then they close off at the end, unless it's gonna be closed off in the next book, which you can then have that arc continue on. There's just all these little things, subtle nuances that you learn when you start learning about plotting that you need to know.

And if you don't know any of that, when you start plotting like I did, your outline is crap. It's just garbage. And so it's a terrible blueprint. It's somebody writing a [00:11:00] blueprint on the back of a Denny's napkin with crayon. It's not something that's gonna get you anywhere. And so. Uh, I got really frustrated by that and that's when I learned about a third or a middle.

I, one of the things that Christina always talks about is there's a third way. There is always another way you need

Christina: door number three.

Sean Dare: Be better than just taking one of the obvious options. And this is an example of that in real life and that is beats. So I was at a writing, I was listening to a writing podcast that's not around anymore unfortunately.

It was called the Self-Publishing Podcast, and they were. They were talking about how they write and they use beats. They don't write an outline in the strictest definition of an outline. They just say, okay, here's, here's the major points that we see happening. And we write those out, and we write 'em, the initial beats, probably about 2000 words.

And then they, they bring that out to about 10 or 15,000 words, and then they'll, they'll end up taking that beat and incorporating it into the story, fold it in, and then it ends up becoming the story. But Beats was a [00:12:00] really fascinating idea to me. This isn't that you need to know every step of every piece of your story when you start.

You just need to know some main points and then let the story kind of write to them. So I decided to try writing beats and that worked out fairly well. I wrote about eight or 10 beats that were pretty short, a couple hundred words each and started writing to them. And turned out I started writing a point that was about.

Four, three or four chapters into my story was the first chapter that I wrote, not, and that was another thing I had to learn was you don't have to write from the beginning. You can start in your story. There's just so many things that you don't have to do that you think you have to do, 'cause you don't know that you don't have to do it. So I started writing. I started writing to beats, and that worked really well for getting a first draft done that was full of cul-de-sacs and black holes and blind turns, and. Extraneous storylines that were not necessary, but it got a story written. It got at least the [00:13:00] story written. And the reason why I kept having all these cul-de-sacs and dark turns and blind alleys was because I was writing in a style, and this is how I describe it to people, is I can see the next beat or the end of the story.

I can see that, but I can't see the path that I need to get there. That's all in the dark, and I have a lantern with me. That only shows me a few steps at a time. And that lantern will let me see the immediate future and I can look up and see where I'm going, but I can't see the direct path. And so what I oftentimes would do is I would go down these cul-de-sacs and then realize it was the wrong cul-de-sac, and then back up and write back into a straight line.

But sooner or later, those cul-de-sacs get into your story. So on rewriting it now with the help of some direction from Christina. I actually have gone through, and now that I know my story better, I've actually written an outline. And the outline is helping me go through and rewrite the story and keep it on the rails, keep it [00:14:00] very focused, keep it on the main characters, cutting out the extraneous storylines that I don't need, and more importantly, avoiding those cul-de-sacs that a cul-de-sac or a blind alley.

What I mean by that is you're writing a. Piece of the story that doesn't have anything to do with the main point of the story. So there's really no reason to keep doing it. So you abandon it partway through the story that just leaves the reader going, why did you take me down here? What

Christina: Yeah. What? What was point of that? Yeah.

Matt: Yep.

Sean Dare: the point in all that? So I ended up, I ended up. Using an outline on the rewrite, and this is where I wanted, we were talking about at what point in your story different pieces of this become valuable. Maybe you know your story well enough to write an outline, but by the time you've written your first draft, you do, and an outline would help you with the rewrite.

Or maybe you're somebody that I know, I know a guy that he cannot write a story without an outline. He just needs to see the whole thing first, and he can see it all in his head. And that was probably the biggest struggle that I had in the [00:15:00] beginning, and it's, this is the piece that made me struggle for years to get started because I could not see the whole story in my head at one time.

I couldn't my mind around 

Christina: Well I think, it's interesting because, when I first heard the concept of your first draft is you telling yourself the story, you telling, figuring out what the story is essentially, and that's what, that's what you were doing and you didn't realize it at the time, but that's what you were doing.

Sean Dare: That correct.

Christina: yes.

Sean Dare: And, that's something new that I learned even after I wrote the first draft, is that really your first draft is you writing it to you and then you're cleaning it up for the, for other people. But the, the thing that surprised me was I thought I would land somewhere on the spectrum and that would be where I would be, and I'm amazed at how I've had to use parts of the spectrum, like the, the more pantsing style to get my first draft [00:16:00] written and then now a more organized.

Outline focused version to get the story completed. Right? Because even though you've gotten a first draft done, that's not completed, you've gotta go and get it cleaned up. You've got to, at least in my case, I have to, I know some people I have a actually Christina and I have a mutual friend that writes very predictably.

She doesn't do a lot of cleanup at the end because, but she writes very slowly. She takes a long time to write each word and. She still, she still has an idea of where everything's going and she's got her, she's got her methods worked out really, really well and she still does do some cleanup in an edit,

Christina: Yeah.

Sean Dare: the amount of cleanup she has to do compared to the amount I have to do,

Christina: Yeah. And, but the difference is, the difference is with her writing. She is also still discovering how she works. And this last draft that we worked on, I. She actually said to me that had she simply let go, it was the [00:17:00] first chapter that actually wasn't quite working. So we reworked it a little bit. And the thing is, she said, I worked for weeks on that first chapter, and she now realizes after, our edit that had she simply just written it, let it go.

Allow the comments to come back to her. She wouldn't have wasted so much time on it, so with her, she's actually learning more to instead of continually, okay, rewrite, rewrite, rewrite until it's right, and then move on to the next chapter. And then rewrite, rewrite. If she just simply moves to the next, to the next, to the next, and as long as she's got some.

Story structure there, some knowledge of what, where the story is going, that she can let go a little bit because again, that first draft, it just just needs to be there.

Sean Dare: there's from that same group that did the Self-Publishing podcast, [00:18:00] they put out a book. I recommend the, I recommend the book for the thoughts that are conveyed, the, the message that's conveyed, but the, in my mind, the writing style was very difficult to follow along, but the book is called "Iterate and Optimize", and what it's talking about is every time you run through the story writing process, you should be, you should be taking note of things that you can, you can. M make minor changes to improve, to optimize your ability to write well, and it's not, it's, it's about remove, like you're talking about Christina, it's about removing those barriers to getting the work done efficiently that are only there because you didn't know they were a barrier and you just incorporated 'em into your process without even realizing it.

And, and our mutual friend could has learned now she doesn't need to keep that barrier in there anymore she can work around it for the future.

Christina: yeah.

For me it,

Sean Dare: I, that's, so, that's the end of my story. was just, I was toss it off to [00:19:00] Matt or, Christina here.

Christina: Yeah. Before Matt jumps into his a couple things I wanted to comment on, from what you said is the takeaway is still absolutely. Everyone needs to figure out how they work best. You can take in all of this advice. You can take in everybody's advice, just take it in, but only take what works for you and leave all the rest.

A lot of times it is really figuring out. What does work for you and you're not gonna figure it out. The first book, the second book, the third book, the fourth book, you know this mutual friend that we're talking about? She actually is on book eight,

Sean Dare: Mm

Christina: I think, so...

Sean Dare: She has some other books that she's released under a pseudonym that wrote before that, so she

Christina: Yeah. Yeah.

Sean Dare: or 12 total.

Christina: Yeah. Yeah. So, she's still figuring out how she works, and, and [00:20:00] with plotting and pantsing for her, I'm not even sure I'd actually put her into one category or another, because again, in this last edit that we did, she said, I absolutely have to leave room for the surprises. I have to leave room.

For these things. I don't know otherwise, and she named all these different moments. She said none of these moments would exist, and some of those things are the best part of the story. So she realized after, years of I'm a plotter, I'm a plotter, that she's gotta leave room for pantsing in there too.

The other thing I wanted to comment on, and I don't think we ever talked about this in any of our sessions, but. When you were talking about you couldn't, you knew the end, but you didn't know how you were gonna get there. Like write backwards, go from the end and go, what has to happen before this? What has to happen before this?

What happens to, like go [00:21:00] backwards and kind of figure out what road leads there instead of all these cul-de-sacs. What road is gonna lead me there? Okay. Now I know what road that is. Okay. What road leads to that part? But you know, that's also very complicated.

Sean Dare: You just gave me an idea. No, you just gave an idea of what I can do to help maybe work on this edit that I'm working on. That might be a way I can make it move even faster.

Christina: Yeah.

Sean Dare: I wanted to, I wanted to throw out there I think one of the most important pieces from what Christina just said that she didn't explicitly say but was implied strongly.

Try it.

Try what you think will work, and if it works great, and if it doesn't discard it, but you can't, you can't, oftentimes you can't think it through and know what's gonna work. I thought plotting was gonna be my salvation and it wasted years of my life trying to figure out how to write plots I, and, and what got me going was.

Doing that hybrid [00:22:00] beats method. So, yeah. Anyway, I just, the, the trying it is important. Try different methods, keep trying different methods and be willing to discard a method that doesn't work.

Christina: Yeah, certainly. So, Matt, what about you? What is your writing like?

Matt: I mean, for me it's been, I think over all of the years that I've tried to really get through a full story mostly it's been pantsing, it's been literally sit down and just write. For example, "The Bagel."

Christina: Yeah.

Matt: story that I shared with you guys that was a 30 minute to an hour story, right, of just writing.

There was no thought in into that, beyond. The initial, I'm gonna write a story about a bagel. I dunno how this goes, but here we go. That has been how I've written, I think, everything in my entire life.

went 

and I think then you start looking at different things like, to Sean's point, you start finding, finding books that resonate with you, that are, that maybe share a new idea or a new concept, and you're like, okay, let me try that because I haven't quite gotten over that bridge and [00:23:00] I want to get there, but I need to figure out how to do it. I think the one thing I would just say for, anybody that is trying to get past, that's trying to figure out, one, I mean try if, certainly something that you need to do is just try something different. Try something that you haven't tried before. But I think the other piece is don't spend too much time worrying about which one you are

Christina: Yes.

Matt: know, which of the three you are.

Right? Like, don't spend too much time worrying about it because honestly, we've just outlined three different. People who all have taken kind of different journeys, right? Like I found Story Shop, which was a lovely little Kickstarter back in the day,

Christina: I miss that

Matt: but was a very, very cool.

Little online platform where you could actually do a lot of your plotting, and they were very focused on beats as well. I personally still have not figured out what the hell beats are or

Christina: I haven't either.

Matt: I, I don't, I still don't, it doesn't make any sense in my brain. Like, I don't know. It's [00:24:00] funny. I'd have have somebody literally draw me a picture and be like, okay, here's, here's a beat.

This is a beat, right? And here's another one, and this is how they come together.

Sean Dare: I can, I can tell you what a beat is. A and b Story Shop, if it's the same one that was created by the same guys that wrote iterate and Optimize, and the same ones that did the Self-Publishing podcast that was created by them. The it's Sterling and Stone the company name. Yes. So,

Matt: they also wrote write, publish, repeat, I think.

Sean Dare: Yes. written quite a few self-help books on they, they've gotten out of that business now. They, at one point, not too long ago, they said, we're gonna focus on being creative and we're gonna stop with the helping other writers get better and good luck. We've put out all our stuff in books and you can, anyway, so back to the point, what is a beat?

So. This is, this is quite easy to explain. So if you've got a scene that you know needs to be in there because it has a critical conversation or it's something that you are really excited to see written, written, that can be a [00:25:00] beat. A beat can also be something that, needs to happen in the story, but maybe you don't know the scene well enough.

You just know that something needs to happen. Like, you know that, that somebody needs to die or you know that somebody needs to be given an ultimatum or that. That somebody's gonna be captured and taken somewhere or whatever, that can be a beat. And beats can start as literally just the heroin gets captured by the, by the bad guy and taken off to his layer.

That's enough. That's a beat, and you can jot that down and you can have as many beats as you feel are necessary to get your story through. And that was the beauty of it. So a lot of times. Outlining books that I had looked at and outlining information I had looked at early on said, you need to have an entry for every scene, and a chapter can have multiple scenes.

So if you have like a 30 chapter book, you could have 60, 80, a hundred scenes that are in there that need to have an entry. What a beat is, is a [00:26:00] beat has nothing to do with the number of scenes. It is just the number of places where you feel you need a touchstone to help Right towards that point, you can have three beats, you can have 50, you can have 10.

It doesn't really matter, and it's a very flexible. Point in that it's the beat is just, is just a point in the story that you can look at and see from some point prior to writing it that I'm gonna need this to happen. And so there's beat.

Christina: Yeah. So that's,

Sean Dare: my story with six beats

Christina: yeah, so that's,

Sean Dare: no, I'm sorry.

Seven.

Christina: so that's kinda what I was talking about before with like guideposts, they're the same

Sean Dare: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Very similar. Yes, exactly. they, or they be. Or they can be extraordinarily detailed, right? The, way Sterling and Stone wrote beats, they were very detailed and they were much more numerous than the beats that I started my story with. So they can be, they can be more of an outline.

They are a, they're that flexible middle. It's like an accordion [00:27:00] middle that you can move the accordion where you need it to be. To, to fit your writing style and still get a modicum of, of some sort of planning in there, right. So,

Christina: Yeah.

Matt: Nice. I like that. I like it. It's also, I think too, when you think about some of the writing tools that are out there, like Scrivener, right? They have sort of that approach where it's based on like the, the index cards so you can have each scene kind of written on the, the synopsis of at least on one side of the, of the card and then any important information on the back that you need to adhere to as well.

Christina: Yeah. And the,

Matt: there's a lot of tools to help kind of guide you in that,

Christina: the ability to move things around as well.

Matt: Mm-hmm.

Sean Dare: Mm-Hmm.

Matt: For

Sean Dare: Double thumbs up for Scrivener. I can't recommend it enough. It's really good

Christina: don't, I don't think I've ever met a writer. Yeah. I don't think I've ever met a writer that, yes, I've met writers who weren't aware of Scrivener, but if you're aware of Scrivener, you have it. [00:28:00] Like there's not anybody that doesn't have it that says, oh no, it doesn't work. I think, I think

Sean Dare: I, I've run into one. I ran into one guy that did, he tried it and he did not like it, and he said reason why is, it's too complicated. He writes in Word. Which I feel like word is actually more complicated, but the, I think the reason why he likes word better is because it doesn't have any organizational pieces to it. Right. It's just you just start writing. Well, I mean, there are some, I'm not gonna lie, there are a few built into Word I'm not gonna go into, but it's not as easy to reorganize as say Scrivener is

Christina: Yeah. But I think that works for some people. I think some people not having the ability to move things around helps their brain function to that piece of the story, so, yeah. 'cause I do know some authors that absolutely 100% have to write it in order [00:29:00] and they can't write it out of order. That to them is.

I mean, I've had one that totally write it out of order too, but yeah.

Matt: Yeah. I think the other thing that I would just, I guess, advise or throw out there for the audience, to kind of consider, right, is the idea about, again, don't worry about what you are, plotter pants. Beater. Hmm. Is that, is that the term? Because honestly,

Sean Dare: term.

Matt: a beater, no beater worse.

Sean Dare: a little bit better.

Matt: A beat oriented writer don't worry about it, because at the end of the day, neither one of none of are better than the others. They're just different methods of getting words down on paper. So find what you gravitate towards in the moment, even. Don't worry about it. If it's, I do this most of the time, or I do this, today I am gonna be a plotter.

Who cares?

Christina: Yeah. Yeah.

Matt: do, just do it. Just do it.

Christina: Well, and the other thing is I, I've, I, I've heard [00:30:00] this a million times. There is no wrong way to write. There is no wrong way to write. There is only what works for you at the time you're writing whatever works. Whatever gets you to the end of that story. There's no wrong way to write, but there is tools, ideas.

Even just talking to other writers, you kind of feed off of their information and go, Hey, I think I can, I can take that and I can do this, and I can do that. So it's not even a matter of, if this is the first time you're hearing plotting or, or the terms pantsing, you can sit there and go, oh, you know what?

I know how to work this for my story.

Sean Dare: I think, I think another thing that's really important to understand is that, give yourself permission to write even if it doesn't feel like you're writing. So I know whenever I've been plotting, I felt like I wasn't actually writing. 'cause see a word count going up every day, [00:31:00] but plotting is writing.

And then I got very frustrated when I reread my manuscript and got my notes back on the edit where I realized how messy it was. And I'm like, man, this is gonna take a lot of work. And it took me a lot of, it took me a long time. To get over the emotional piece first that, oh crap, I got a lot of work ahead of me again.

Right? I wrote it once. That was hard enough. Now I gotta go write it again. And, you gotta give yourself that permission to just go in and do it. And then that iterate and optimize. See if there's a way where you can make it, where you don't have to write yourself into these cul-de-sacs again, so that you don't have to go and rewrite as much the next time.

But giving yourself permission to, to write whether that's actually a word count going up, or whether that's an outline, or whether that's notes or whatever. Give yourself permission to do that and give yourself permission to write crap. At the very, especially at the beginning of any project. I don't mean this, I do mean this for the, for an author starting out, that's a, that's a very [00:32:00] good piece of advice, but I also mean that.

When you're in a project, writing crap is still writing. You can rewrite it later, you can toss it later, you can, you can go in whatever later. It doesn't matter until it's published, it doesn't matter. So if you're stuck because you feel like you can't write as well as you wanna write because you don't know what tool is necessary to make it work, then just keep trying 'em and write crap, and then eventually you'll figure out how to write better.

So

Matt: Yep. Yep. The other thing you can try doing too even if especially if you're stuck, give yourself a creative constraint. Like give yourself some sort of creative constraint. Like today, I'm only gonna write, I'm only allowed to, to write three lines. That's it. can't write any more than that. I can't write any less than that, but I have to write three lines of something.

Or your creative constraint is you have to write an entire story in limericks. Right, whatever, [00:33:00] whatever it is. But give yourself sometimes those little creative constraints, because that's where creativity really, really blossoms the most, is when there's little quirky constraints on it. So if you're stuck, use these to kind of get yourself unstuck

Christina: well, writing limericks would kill my brain.

Sean Dare: yeah, I

Matt: and can't use chat GPT

Christina: Yeah, yeah. No. And I want to add one thing to what both of you said. Don't forget about daydreaming. Daydreaming is part of writing. The ideas come from somewhere and when you are daydreaming and just thinking and free thought and. Whatever.

You are opening up your creativity for the ideas to come in. So it's not, Sean is right. It's not just about typing at the keyboard and putting words to the story. It's [00:34:00] also these other things. And so you can't be too hard on yourself if you know you're having trouble and you go for a walk and your mind just begins to wander and all of a sudden, poof.

There's the idea, you've solved your problem. Daydreaming is a very, very important part of writing.

Matt: 100%. I also, you touched on what I was about to say, which is, and if you're, if you're stuck, if you're just sitting at that keyboard or that typewriter or that notebook and you just can't get any further, or you can't, get yourself out of whatever conundrum you find yourself in, go do something else for a little while.

Go for a walk, right? Go the dishes, go mow the lawn, whatever, but then come back and you'd be surprised sometimes how much that actually helps.

Christina: Yes.

Sean Dare: got another tip. That's worked well for me. I almost never sit down at my computer to write. I sit down at my computer to do something else. I lie to myself so. [00:35:00] Um, 'cause, 'cause writing is a daunting task, right? You think about, I gotta, I gotta do all this work. And it can really, it can, it can sabotage you before you even get to the keyboard.

Like, you may be, maybe you're at a point where you're, okay, I got two hours, I can go down and, and write, and then you think about all you've gotta write and it just feels so overwhelming. What I do. I tell myself, I'm gonna go sit at my computer and do something else. I'm gonna read my story, or I'm gonna play some music on my computer or. I have a media pc on my desk over here. So a lot of times I need to rip like a movie or a TV show DVD that I bought. Like I, like, I'll buy a a television show, DVD series and I gotta rip the episodes off onto my media pc. So that's just me. I'm not saying you need to be an IT guy, but for me that works.

I sit down, I'm like, I'm just gonna go downstairs and rip a disc, and then while I'm doing that, I'm gonna listen to some music. Oh, and then while I'm doing that, I'll go ahead and open my story. Oh, while I'm doing that, I'll just kinda read it a little bit. Next thing 1500 words later and an hour [00:36:00] later, I.

I've written for the day, right? But I didn't go down there to write, I wrote, I went down there to do something else and or to, in, into the office to do something else. So that's a huge one for me that gets me over that initial hump. It turns out, once I'm sitting there and once I've got myself thinking about the story, the story starts to flow and I can't keep from making edits and then writing new stuff, and yeah,

Christina: Yeah. So once again, yeah. So once again, it is about do what works for you. Take, take your own, ideas, whatever. If you hear something from somebody else and you go, wait a minute, if I just flip that on its head, that would work for me. So, yeah, you just gotta do what? What works for you?

Sean Dare: Works for

Matt: Amen. Amen. And on that note, so we've talked about. pantsing versus plotting. We've talked about what happens if you can't write because maybe, you've, you [00:37:00] find yourself a little frustrated that you can't decide to pants or plot or beats the story. Yeah. I don't know how we're gonna say that. Turn it into a verb.

But anyway, so we've talked about a lot of topics. Any, any kinda last comments?

Christina: Again, I, I think for me is, is take the advice and see what does work for you. Try try them all out. Yeah, just figure out, figuring out how you write is important because when you are doing what works for you, the story is gonna come easier. Maybe not quicker, but easier.

Matt: But easier. Sean, how about you?

Sean Dare: I don't know that I have anything exceptionally pithy to say I wish I did, but. I think, I think if I were to, to kind of sum up the writing experience writing is work. It is a four letter word. Even though [00:38:00] technically the dictionary says write has five letters. It's four letters, it's a four letter word, it's a work word.

And the idea that it doesn't take effort. Is surprisingly prevalent, even amongst some newbie authors. There's people out there that think it, it doesn't take a lot of work, but it does. It takes a lot of work. And it's something that you can't keep yourself from doing, like me, I can't, I cannot not do it.

Then you just have to be willing to trade the work for the, for the effort, right. To get, to get something out of it. So. Part of that work is typing the words. Part of, but another part and probably a, a much more important part for the longevity of your career and the betterment of your career is the work of finding out ways to, to make the work better and easier and smarter and more efficient and

Matt: And more interesting.

Sean Dare: and more Absolutely. So. I think a lot of people have the [00:39:00] idea, once they learn that writing is work, they have the idea that it's always gonna be hard work and it cannot ever get easier. But I think that by reexamining what you're doing on a periodic basis, you can make it better and make it easier. On yourself and then, and, and, and, and better in the quality of the work you're producing.

I mean, we're not just saying that you can take a story and write it faster and it's less quality or lower quality. It can be a higher quality work that maybe was done faster or without as much of a strain or without as much fighting against the tide of your own preconceived notions. So that's it.

Writing is work and you just like any other work, it can be optimized to whatever degree you want it to be.

Matt: There you go. So we'll put a bow on it and we're gonna end on that note. So thank you very much for joining us, Sean. We appreciate it. We,

Sean Dare: Yes. having me. It was

Matt: of course, course. And Christina,

Christina: Yeah.

Matt: Always good to [00:40:00] see you.

Sean Dare: Yes,

Matt: Alright, well until next time, thanks for, thanks for stopping by. Bye.

Christina: Bye.

Sean Dare: goodbye.

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