 Hello, my name is Jackie and welcome back to my channel and in this video I am having a minor identity crisis about who I am as a writer and what prompted this is that for the last almost two months now I have been either preparing for Nanarimo or doing Nanarimo. So all of October was focused on preparation and plotting and then the last few weeks have all been about getting my 50,000 words out. What prompted this identity crisis was that I always wanted to be a plotter, I always thought I would be a plotter and then when I started plotting in October it didn't go well or maybe it didn't go that badly but it didn't go as well as I'd hoped. You see I had an entire month of preparation time and I thought by the end of that month I would have a completed outline for my book so I would have every single scene listed and mapped out so that when I sat down to write I'd know exactly what I would be writing that day and I wouldn't be, I wouldn't get stuck. And along with creating anxiety about the fact that I was probably going to fail Nanarimo because I hadn't achieved that it also made me question who I was as a writer because the thing is so before starting this YouTube channel and even now in my day job my background is as a non-fiction writer so for the past 12 years I've been working as a copywriter and a content marketer and I also used to have a publishing company that helped entrepreneurs write awesome books and in that company I wrote the book on how to plot for non-fiction so I wrote a book called Book Blueprint how any entrepreneur can write an awesome book and the focus of that book is outlining the argument is that if you have a thorough outline or in my words blueprint when you sit down to write you will write successfully you will know what you're going to write every day you won't get stuck doing research and googling or just looking at the curse of blinking on a blank page and you will write well you will know exactly what you need to cover you'll know which order it needs to be covered in you'll know which questions you need to answer to make sure you discuss everything you want to discuss in depth and as a non-fiction writer and editor so as someone who edited these books and as someone who ghost wrote books for some of our clients that was the process I followed and in fact even in writing the book on blueprinting I had a 10,000 word blueprint before I started writing and that meant I got my first draft out in three days admittedly it was not a publishable draft it didn't need a bit of work but having the blueprint was what allowed me to write it so quickly and even though it did need a bit of work it was probably 80 percent there in its first draft form so it's not like I wrote this first draft really quickly and then had to throw everything out like 80 percent of it was good to go the other thing I thought was that if I was a pancer surely I would have panced by now like I've been wanting to get back into writing fiction since I was at university because the last fiction thing I wrote was when I was at uni and then I got a real job and I stopped and I thought part of the reason why I wasn't writing was because I didn't have the time to put to do the plotting and to put that thought in and to have the creative space that you need to get ideas together and I thought that if I was a pancer then I would have been hit by a lightning bolt of inspiration at some point and would have just been able to type out scene after scene and they all came to me in this beautiful experience where I was inspired by some sort of muse and that never happened either so I was at this point where I was like well I've never panced I've never plotted successfully and maybe that means that I don't have what it takes to start writing fiction maybe I should just even before I'd started really I was thinking that maybe I didn't have what it took to write fiction and maybe I should just give up then now side note maybe I don't have what it takes to write fiction I am still just getting started but at least I'm trying so this was where my mind was at when I saw a video by Kat Cho where she talked about plotting and pancing but she used different words she talked about architects and gardeners which came from George RR Martin so this divides writers into the same two categories those who plan and those who don't but he describes it a little bit differently so I'll just share those definitions with you so in Mr Martin's words I think there are two types of writers the architects and the gardeners the architects plan everything ahead of time like an architect building a house they know how many rooms are going to go in the house what kind of roof they're going to have where the wires are going to run and what kind of plumbing there's going to be they have the whole thing designed and blueprinted about before they even nail the first board up the gardeners dig a hole drop a seed and water it they know what kind of seed it is they know if they planted a fantasy seed or a mystery seed or whatever but as the plant comes up and they water it they don't know how many branches it's going to have and they find out as it grows so before I saw this video and I saw these definitions I thought I needed to be a plotter or I wasn't a writer I just didn't see pancing as an option for me simply because as I said earlier if I was a pancer I would have had some moment when I'd written in that way however when I saw these two definitions so the architect and the gardener it made me sit back because I thought well in every other area of my life I'm a gardener so I don't have a roadmap for my life I've never had a five-year plan at most I know what I want to do in maybe the next year or so so five years ago I had no idea I'd be living in Estonia at the moment working for a financial company five years before that I didn't know I'd have a publishing company I didn't know I would be working for myself full-time or that I'd go to all of these international events that I went to and do all of this traveling because I had the freedom because I was working for myself five years before that I don't maths is not my strong suit I think five years before that I was in uni so then I had no idea I was doing an arts degree and didn't really know anything about online marketing and copywriting and content marketing which is where the corporate side of my career has developed so every stage of my life my approach has been let's figure out the next step and then once I'm in that step and I learn more I'll know what to do with that information and I can figure out the next step from there so when I was in high school the next step was university I was going to do an arts degree no idea what would happen after that got towards the end of the arts degree I knew I wanted to travel I went to London for 18 months and worked there didn't know what would happen next spent the next couple of years bouncing around to different countries got back to Australia decided I was going to give corporate ago which didn't really work for me and that led me to starting my business but every time it was just I had a next step and didn't know what would come after it so why did I assume that writing fiction would be different and why was I putting all of this pressure on myself to try and have every single step mapped out when in every other part of my life I only have the next one or two and what's interesting is that I think the reason I put this pressure on myself was because I'm an outliner and a plotter for nonfiction so when I do nonfiction books I have everything mapped out but the reason for that is because one most of the time I'm working on a book that isn't mine it's not knowledge coming from my head so I need to get the information from the author which means it all needs to be mapped out otherwise it's just going to be constant back and forth and me asking them questions as I get to the next part of the book and don't know what's supposed to be there but the other thing is that even if it's your own nonfiction book assuming it's like a nonfiction how-to type of book the goal of those books is to share your knowledge it's to share like the process that you already go through with your coaching clients or your personal training clients or whatever your business is and to distribute that in book form now that assumes you already have that knowledge you already have that process so mapping it out is infinitely simpler because you already have the information it's just a step on the way to writing a book that gets the information out of your head and onto the page and that makes the writing process easier because you get you do the thinking before you do the writing if that makes sense fiction's a different ball game because you at least I don't have all of the information so when it was October the idea that I ended up deciding to work on for November the only thing I knew when I started planning it was this one scene I'd had that I dreamt so I knew it was about a girl in a family of superheroes who didn't have superpowers and she was kicked out and told not to come back until she had powers that was all I had and even though I know there are people who plot I know there are architects I know there are plotters who would probably map all of that out before they got started and maybe I could have if I had a bit more time telling myself it was the only way I was going to get the book done probably wasn't the healthiest way to go about it and even when I think about the nonfiction things I've written the plotting and blueprinting approach only really applies to books like if I'm writing an article or a blog post or even like an ultimate guide and they tend to be sort of five to ten thousand words usually I don't have an outline I just I either have the knowledge and I know what I want to say and I start writing and it generally generally comes out somewhat articulate and I can go back and edit it or or I research and I cobble it together as I'm doing the research but I don't yeah I don't outline it up front so it's just it's just interesting that I put all this pressure on myself in terms of fiction and I imagine there are a lot of other new writers who are doing this especially when you read a lot of the plotting type books so story engineering save the cat take your pants off and all the others that tell you that this is the only way to success so if you've been in this position maybe rather than thinking of strict plotting and pantsing try thinking about architects and gardeners because I think those definitions are a little bit more forgiving in terms of me and my writing what I've noticed with Nanorimo is that even though I didn't get as far as I wanted with the plotting in October now I'm into week four of Nanorimo at the time of filming this video I have over 36 000 words and I'm on track even though I didn't have the complete plot or the complete outline I'd hoped for and what's interesting is that even when I go back and look over what I've done already and there are clearly scenes in there from the original outline there's a whole lot in there that was never in the outline even in those scenes there are things that you know puzzles my brain put together as the world started developing and as the characters started developing and if I had waited until I had the entire thing outlined I mean I would have missed Nanorimo because you know time is time days keep passing but I might never have written the book because I never would have given myself the opportunity to sort of discover as I went so yeah if you're like me and putting pressure on yourself to be a plotter and it just isn't working maybe think of yourself as a gardener where you know the shape of your idea you might even have a few scenes or a few of the next steps mapped out but just because you don't know the whole thing doesn't mean your death your sentence to failure so hope you enjoyed that ramble if you did please like and subscribe I generally do videos about twice a week and I'd love to hear from you are you a plotter or a pancer or are you an architect or gardener and have you experienced a similar identity crisis to what I did when you thought you should be one and that just wasn't working for you until next time bye