History buffs or aviation buffs or people like me, who are just meaningless trivia buffs, may recall the story of Douglas “Wrong Way” Corrigan. Corrigan, according to History.com, was one of the last of the high flying daredevils known as barnstorming pilots. He once flew from California to New York. That’s not where he got his nickname. He had apparently filed a flight plan for the next leg of his voyage involving a trans-Atlantic flight to Ireland, which was denied, being deemed suicidal. He was given permission to fly back to California, though, and he at least seemed to be ready to comply. When he took off, however, after initially heading toward California, the crowd gathered to see him off watched in shock, as Corrigan suddenly did a one-eighty and disappeared into a cloud bank, not to be heard from again until many hours later, when he landed in Dublin. His claims that his compass malfunctioned and he got lost, only coincidentally landing exactly where he’d requested permission to fly in the first place, were soundly rejected by the authorities. Even in the face of losing his license to fly, he never relented from his claim that he had just flown the wrong way. His seemingly impromptu flight was summed up by a headline in Illinois’ Edwardsville Intelligencer, which stated, “Corrigan Flies By The Seat Of His Pants.” And one of the legends for how that term was born. There are others versions, but all of them include someone doing something, originally flying, but eventually anything at all, without planning or outside help.

The term pantser has to have grown out of that. I say has to because, after an exhaustive search (I even went to the second screen on Google!), I can find no evidence for who coined the term or when it came into being, unless you count the Wictionary article on the medieval German term pantser, which, it seems, is part of a suit of armor. I’m guessing it’s the part that covers from the waist down, but I could be wrong. The article did mention pantser writing, but only that it exists. It also had a link to the term pantsing, but that is a whole other rabbit hole, something into which I’ve already fallen. Back to being a pantser.

A pantser is a writer who likes to write without a solid step-by-step plan, or plot, to follow. This person starts with an idea or character or scene in mind and may or may not have an endpoint, clear or vague, in mind, but even if there is a specific target to shoot for, the panters will often have little to no idea what’s going to happen to cause the characters to get from point A to point Z.

I fall on the pantser end of the spectrum for sure. The reality is no one is purely one thing or another, but all writers fall somewhere between being a pantser and its opposite pole, a plotter. Depending on how far toward that end you are, you may go so far as to storyboard your entire book, but at the very least, you probably have a summary with major plot points, or beats, as some call them. A full-on plotter will not only have an idea of what each chapter will hold, but also what scenes each chapter will hold. A pantser, on the other hand, is much like someone exploring an unfamiliar house in the dark with a flashlight. They can see as far as the light’s beam goes and not one inch more. They don’t know what’s behind that door any more than you do until they open it. It could be a dead body or it could be a dead end.

That leads to one of the issues with being a pantser. Sometimes I write myself into a corner or, as I did earlier, go down a rabbit hole, wasting many pages on a thread that doesn’t advance the main plotline in any way. When I realize I’ve done this, inevitably after I’ve played the thread completely out, I could be Victor Hugo and just leave in the fifty pages on the history of the sewer system in Paris, or I could do the right thing and just hit delete. But even that isn’t time wasted, as long as I take what I’ve learned about the characters and let it help me color in the scenes that actually do tell the story I want to tell.

Another issue I run into is what I call anomalous trajectory. I heard it once on a show about the space race between the US and the Soviet Union. They talked about how, if they had even a slightly anomalous trajectory, or get their calculations off by just a tiny degree, they could literally miss the moon by thousands of miles. I’ve anomalized my trajectory a couple of times in my day by making a guess of how many words it’s going to take to tell a particular story. And, as you can probably guess, I’ve never guessed high. The first time came in an as yet unfinished book that doesn’t involve Harry and Dee. I was planning one book about a girl who loses her single mom and finds the man she thinks is her dad only to learn the man is a scheming liar who wants to take advantage of her. Doesn’t that sound like a great book? Turns out it’s at least two. Who knows–maybe three. I was a hundred thousand words in when I put it away and the end isn’t even a dot off in the distance. Another example is the Shalan Adventure I’m working on right now. It was supposed to be the back half of the previous book, Hold Your Peace. But there were just too many words between where I started and where I needed to be to meet up with the beginning of the next book, Harsh Prey, which I’d already written. So Hold Your Peace has turned into book one of two.

Frustrating as it can be sometimes, I still enjoy being a pantser. Plotters claim there’s just as much discovery in their style as there is in mine, but I just don’t buy it. I’ll take the closed roads and the missed exits and the extended scenic routes every time over having the whole route mapped out for me and knowing exactly which turn to take where. There might just be a wondrous adventure at the very next exit.