 Hello everybody! E here. Today is a request for a From the Desk episode from my friend LairtisDD here on YouTube. He wanted me to talk about Pantsync. There is... It's one of the number one questions that is asked by reviewers, especially template... not reviewers, interviewers. Especially template interviewers is, are you a plotter or a pancer? I myself am mostly a pancer. I just sit down and start writing. Recently I had to do some plotting to try and make sure that my... But it was kind of after the fact, after I had written all the books, I went back with the last three books to make sure that they made sense contextually. And I had to draw out an outline and actually write down everything. But that's a bit different because I still winged it. Wunged it? Winged it. I'm an author. I use words. But the last three Bayes End books, which I completed back in 2016, No Home for Boys was finished back, I think it was 2016. I panced, I winged it throughout that entire series with one thought in mind, knowing where No Home for Boys was going to end. Now if you're watching this video when I upload it, you still have to wait until June to read No Home for Boys. But Bayes End was a pancer novel, The Sound of Broken Ribs, The Bedding of Boys, Everything is Horrible Now, and No Home for Boys. All those books were panced. But the last three were outlined after the fact and I had to do some major changes to the last two books to make them fit because that's the problem that you have with pancing. Now the whole purpose of pancing is to get out the raw emotional story that is stuck in your head. Basically what Stephen King calls, and I know I go back to him all the time, but I learned most of the stuff that I've learned from Stephen King, so I always harken back to him unless I can get some better information off another author and then I'll bring them up. But he calls it, it's like archeology. The stories are there, we're just uncovering them. I feel the same way for a plotter, it's just what a plotter does with their outlines and their brainstorming is what a pancer does when they're just writing. Now a first draft from a pancer looks like a hot mess. I've heard Lee Child writes a near perfect pancer novel, but he also has established characters. He has established lore and back, I want to say lore, but it's history with the characters because he writes thrillers, Jack Reacher and what not. It's much easier to write a thriller with recurring characters because you don't have to keep up with, well it's easier to keep up with because you're only working with a set group of folks. Now you have Jack Reacher doing his thing, he always does the same thing, you know he's a badass, that kind of thing, and you have people coming in and out of his life. Whereas with standalone, you're dealing with a brand new cast of characters every single time and you do not have that established history. So do I think Lee Child cheats? No, but do I think it's a little bit easier to do that? Yes, because I myself had to do that at one point in time in my career. Now I've had several series, thriller series, I've had one under this name, the Larry Loughlin series, three of those books still aren't actually four of them, I keep forgetting that Penny's isn't out yet. But Hope for the Wicked, Penny's for the Damned, Flesh for the Asking, Corpses for the Grinder, and Judgment for the Righteous are all in that series. So my own personal belief is that it's easier to pants when you have established characters. It's much easier to take those characters and do something with them. Of course if that's easier then I find either big cast or new cast much more difficult to manage because you're having to come up with whole new histories, whole new everything. Now how do you do it? That's the magical question, that's why Learty's wanted me to do this. And I'm kind of skirting around it because I don't even know how I do it, so we're going to talk it out. I'm actually going to sit here and I'm going to try to pants. Now I'm going to put my money where my mouth is, I have no way to screen record, but I can write you what comes up. Now when I sit down, my process is I'm going to open up, and I don't have a screen recorder either, so I apologize for that. The only thing I could really do is have another camera back here recording it, but I mean, you can take me for my word I hope. I'm going to go into my writing software by the way, I use Word, I don't use Scrivener or any of these other apps or anything, I don't understand why anybody would use anything other than Word, I know you have to pay for it, and I know Google Docs is free, I hate Google Docs, it is a laggy mess, and I don't use it. I'm going to go into new. When I start a new project, sometimes I had to finish that series, so I had in mind I was going from one book to the next, to the next, to the next, to the next. When I originally wrote Bayes End, I had an idea for a sequel to it that ended up being about a thousand pages long. I chopped that up and turned it into the series that it became, because each one of those characters had a much bigger backstory, because I knew from the get-go, and this is a slight spoiler for Bayes End, I knew that Eddie's ghost wasn't just Trey's imagination. So when I go in, this is new for me, so I wish I had a screen recorded to do this, but when I go in, I usually do Untitled, I do type that first, and I type my name. Edward Lorne. Sorry, it is up on a, okay. I'm not comfortable, because of this thing. Anybody use those things? I'm supposed to, because I got the carpet tunneler syndrome. So I do that, I type my name, and then I just start typing. One of the things that I remember a editor of mine saying, an editor saying, she said she got rid of the first three paragraphs of anybody's work. And any time a book starts, or a new chapter starts, she got rid of the first three paragraphs. And the person, the writer barely even noticed that it had been deleted. Now there's two problems with that. First off, I called her on it because track changes, I mean we work with track changes, you can see what's deleted, and I can't imagine anybody just blindly agreeing to the first three paragraphs, but I do know where she's coming from. Most authors take a good three paragraphs, sometimes it's a whole page to get going. I know I'm that way, usually when I sit down to write, the first 500 words is utter garbage that I either have to clean up, extremely, because not only are you working through your mental capacity, but you also have a physical limitability, no that's not right. What's that word? I'm an author, y'all. It's the second time I've said this. You also have, you have to get through the physicality also, so your fingers have to warm up. You're going to make a lot of errors, you're going to type stuff like your instead of you are a contraption, you're going to make huge mistakes. The opening of any chapter, if you're like me and write chapter to chapter to chapter, the opening of every chapter is going to be pretty rough. Now recently, I used to do, actually that's a lie, I used to do chapter to chapter to chapter, so many chapters in a day, but nowadays I just write until I hurt. So I try to get, but I still try to wrap up that thought without wrapping up that scene. What I mean by that is I always leave something unwritten for the next day, it gives me the motivation to come out here and do it. Now it's kind of like, well it is routine, not kind of like, it's routine, I come out and I do it. Now what we're going to do is I'm going to, this is pantsing. I have nothing in my head, in fact I'm focused on talking to you guys, so what's going to come out probably has to do with writing. And I'll stop every line and say whatever I wrote. So I just typed, the darkness was overpowering, I have no idea why. In the corner stood a damaged mannequin, I could probably just read, I could probably read this, okay this is a prime example, I just typed it's, the mannequin tilted its head, I did the IT apostrophe S which is wrong. It would be the ITS without the apostrophe because that's the possessive one. So the mannequin tilted its head, let's see here, what did it do? I don't know what it did. I don't want to use, I always like to use gathering info but that's terrible writing, collecting information, that's not a way, because that's, it might be what this sentient mannequin is doing because it just tilted its head. But let's just keep on going, let's do gathering information about the room. That's how you don't get, that's how you try not to get stuck on gathering information. Why not gathering in information is what I typed, gathering information about the room. That's bad writing, okay, but how you work panting is you just plow through, you don't think too hard, I'm thinking too hard right now because I have someone watching me, I have all of you watching me. But the darkness was overpowering, in the corner stood a damaged mannequin. The mannequin tilted its head, gathering information about the room. And then I'm a stickler for going in and actually setting up my formatting so that I don't have to do it later. So I do my indent paragraph by point three. So I do that, I also work in, now it's starting to bother me because it's not, it's set for Calibre, Calibre whatever it's called. I go to Times Roman and then I go to twelve and then I set the paragraph spacing to one point five and no, and the before and after is zero. And I'm a happy dude after that. So I'm gonna call this, now I have a title, I'm just gonna call it mannequin for now. Now that I know, now that I'm in here doing this, I really should have done this on Google Docs and then record it. I think I'll do that next time, if you guys wanna see that or if you wanna, you want me to do this live next time, now the feed will break up of course because I don't have the best internet. But what we can do is I can record this and write live so it'd be kind of backwards. It's a commentary afterwards. If you guys are interested in that, let me know down there in the doobly-doo. So the darkness was overpowering. At this point I'm gonna keep on rereading what I have in case, if I ever get stuck or whatever and if you do get stuck to the point where you can't think anymore, move on to something else. The darkness was overpowering and the corner stood a damaged mannequin. The mannequin tilted its head gathering information about the room. Now the editor in me already wants to know what the mannequin looks like. So I would go back, if I kept on doing that, just to pad this, if not padding, really, because you need to know, stood a damaged mannequin, one missing arm, one missing arm and a shit face, the damaged, I'm gonna do a damaged mannequin colon. I like the way that looks better with one missing arm and a shit face. Now I think I'll do a comma there. See, this is how I work. This is how I work when I don't know what to write next. I go back and I edit what I already have. The darkness was overpowering and the corner stood a damaged mannequin, one, stood a damaged mannequin with one missing arm and a chipped face. The beige, beige, no, the white styrofoam, I don't know how to spell styrofoam, I know it's supposed to be capitalized, peeking through the beige flesh. It's not really flesh, but I like that. I like the image of that, so I'm gonna do, so all that's the, that first sentence has grown to the darkness, no, it's the first two sentences. The darkness was overpowering, in the corner stood a damaged mannequin with one missing arm and a chipped face, the white styrofoam peeking through the beige flesh. The mannequin tilted its head, gathering information about the room. Okay, that's where we're gonna stop for this. Now, I had no idea sitting down, and this is where the magic comes in. I hate saying it like that, because you guys want information, you guys want hard facts. I don't have hard facts for you. I sat down, I haven't, last time I've seen a mannequin, probably watching a Markiplier gameplay on YouTube, is probably a year ago. I haven't been thinking about mannequins, mannequins are not up in here in my head. That image came from somewhere, in a dark room, the darkness is overpowering, there's some weight to it, and in the corner stood a damaged mannequin, and the closer I looked in my head at this thing, the more I saw, that's why I had to go back and edit it, because I wanted to know exactly what it looked like. And then the mannequin was inquisitive, so the easiest way to denote that, or to bring that across, is to have it tilt its head, you know, like an inquisitive dog. That's an overused thing too. I still use it, but it's overused. Gathering information about the room is bad writing. Gathering information about the room is not interesting verbiage. So I would go back and change that in another draft. But the first and foremost, what you are doing is the same thing that a plotter is doing. You're just actually writing the story as you're doing it. What you're going to do later on is you're going to go back, instead of writing it out the first time as a first draft, you are going to write a rough draft that is a mangled mess. And then you're going to take that and use that as an outline to rewrite the book. That's all pantsing is. It's just a different way of brainstorming. So I hope this has helped, especially for you, the RTDD. I have no idea how long this video is. I'm expecting it's pretty long and rambling. But you guys seem to like that stuff. So yeah. But until next time, I have been E, you have been U. This has been From the Desk. I'll talk to you guys later. Bye-bye.