Pantsing a Novel: What I Have Learned So Far

“Pantsing” is writing a novel by the seat of your pants, without an outline. Until this novel, currently codenames The Colors of Their Trade I have also worked from detailed outlines. My most intensive outline was more than 80 pages with the story broken down to almost each and every scene.

Trade started with just a vague odea of exploring the subtextual themes in Kurt Siodak’s 1941 screenplay for The Wolf-Man. Then a single scene occurred to me, I wrote it and my fellow scribes in our writing group seemed to enjoy it. Now I am 17,000 words into a novel that IO hope lands between 80,000 and 100,00 words and I have learned a bit about what it is like in world of pantsers.

First off, in addition to the document I am writing I need to have a companion document open at the same time where I can keep a list of the characters and their traits. Instead of having worked them out ahead of time and usually documented in a database of sorts, I need to make these notes as they appear because in four or five chapters I may not remember their details if I do not.

Second, I am not flying entirely blind into the dark night of the plot. As a proponent of the 5-act structure, I have in my mind a mental map of how the story should be shaped. I may not have an outline for each act with every major twist and turn laid out as map, but I do have destinations in sight and those, hopefully, will be enough to keep me on course.

Third, trust my instincts. Major characters have appeared in scenes where I had not expected any characters to make an entrance. Intuition inspired a chance meeting and that intuition has been cultivated by decades of writing and analyzing stories and their structures. So, when Tony Packard appears and steps forward as the pastor of the new church with its twisted Christian ideology, I have learned to let him.

Fourth, don’t sweat solutions to problems that haven’t yet appeared in the text. I knew that certain world-building and supernatural processes needed to be crafted for this modern horror novel. When I worked by outline, I would have stopped and solved those issues before committing to composing the outline, here I have not. I have trusted that I will be able to solve the puzzle when the time arrives, and I have already. last night as sleep snuck into my brain an answer, consistent with the characters, the theme, and the tone burst from my synapses.

So, with the novel about 1/5 drafted I am surprisingly confident I might make this work. Certainly, the years of writing and critiquing has helped, but so have decades of running Role Play Games where plot and story are often hastily laid down just ahead of the player’s speed locomotive have also contributed to this book.

Classic Noir Review: Don’t Bother to Knock

Nell (Marilyn Monroe), a young woman shattered by grief and with only a tenuous grasp on

20th Century Fox Studios

reality, has, thanks to her Uncle Eddie (Elisha Cook Jr.) an elevator operator, been hired to baby sit Bunny, an eight-year-old, in a posh hotel while her parents attend a convention banquet. Elsewhere in the hotel Jed Towers (Richard Widmark) is coming to grips with his lady love, Lyn (Anne Bancroft) ending their relationship because Jed is not empathic with a cold heart. Spotting each other in their respective hotel room across a courtyard, Jed and Nell begin a flirtation that dangerously unhinges Nell from reality with potentially lethal outcomes.

On screen, I have seen Ms. Monroe in all sorts of emotional states, she has been ditzy, she has been sexy, she has been conniving but until last night I had never experience Marilyn Monroe as frightening. More than once in the film when Nell, disturbed and distraught, viewed her babysitting charge as an impediment the cold, calculating, and evil intent upon her face as she contemplated murdering a child was more horrific than many modern blood and gore movies.

The simple, spare direction of Roy Ward Baker, here simply credited as Roy Baker, elevates the taunt tension filled atmosphere of the film. With its brief running time and limited set, the entire story unfolds in the hotel over a single evening, Don’t Bother to Knock could very have been a B picture but there is nothing ‘B’ about Marilyn Monroe’s chilling performance.

Don’t Bother to Knock is currently playing on The Criterion Channel as part of the collection ‘Starring Marilyn Monroe,’ and available on VOD for rental elsewhere.

Pride 2023 Terrifies Me

It is not what Pride celebrates that scares me, since the late 1970s I have found the legal and social discrimination against the gays and their brethren utterly evil and idiotic. I am old enough to remember the Anita Bryant kerfuffle and recognized even then just how wrong and hateful her campaign was no matter how many times they repeated the delusional incantation, ‘love the sinner hate the sin.’ No, Pride represents the beginning of the real fight for freedom and equality and for aspect of our nation is it as important as the 4th of July.

What terrifies me is the poisonous atmosphere of 2023 with its escalating number of mass shootings along with the rising tide of Family Values Fascism.

Mass shootings are a social contagion, with each instance acting like a chemical catalyst lowering the activation energy of the process, accelerating the reaction brings more shootings and more death. As reported by the BBC there have been more than 200 hundred mass shootings in 2023. The contagion is running unchecked.

The political environment is particularly dire. An entire political party in our two-party system is succumbing to an anti-democratic dogma that can best be described as neo-fascist. Abandoning the rule of law and democratic norms they have embraced hatred and scapegoating as tools to seize power. Still bitter over marriage equality, but recognizing that the tide had turned against them, they targeted another sexual minority for their hatred, lies, and venom, the transsexual community. Empowered by their reactionary fury they stoke fear, anger, and hatred in a base already inclined to violence.

These twin lethal cultural currents are what terrifies me about Pride 2023. It is my most sincere hope we can get to the 4th of July without any deadly violence at Pride events but there will be no shock or surprise if we do not.

Should Pride events be canceled during this terrifying time?

No.

The danger must be recognized and dealt with, but it must not be appeased. That only empowers it more. Pride must go on.

I am terrified but I am also hopeful. These are the dying spasms of an older ideology and generation, survive these and better days are ahead.

Thoughts on the 2024 Presidential Contest

Though it is more than a year in the future the next presidential contest will be upon us fast and horrid.

THE PRIMARIES

On the Democratic side, barring any extraordinary exogenous event, such as a serious health event, Joe Biden will be the nominee. Robert F Kennedy jr., despite a name of Democratic royalty, will be a gadfly and I fully expect that vaccine denying idiot to be tossed aside and not present any serious threat.

For the Republicans things are much dicer, dangerous, and chaotic.

No declared and soon to be declared candidate has shown the chop, the skill, and the willingness to be a ‘Trump killer’ if such a thing is possible within the poisonous voter base the GOP has built over the last 30 years. So, there will a fight across the primaries, and I suspect right on to the convention floor, unless Trump simply wins the primary contest right out. If Trump wins the delegates count in the primary the GOP will stay true to their runny, warm jello spines and supplicate themselves again the macaroni Mussolini. IF Trump does not win the primaries, then he will challenge each and every loss as stolen, turning to the courts and the local party apparatus, the latter which he has gained a firm hand on, to take the delegates anyway.

Should Trump fail to steal the delegates in the courts or in the local committees, then the floor fight will start, and it will not be a calm, considered conflict, but a vicious brawl waged with Trump’s well-known restraint.

Should he win that fight he will go into the election with the GOP fractured, a weakened but not a defeated candidate.

Should he lose that fight, I do not think, as many do, that he will run as a third-party pick, but rather he will stand on the side and throw figurative eggs at the GOP candidate. Pettiness and vengeance are much more powerful emotions for Trump than any form of reason. This alternate future I think would give Biden his best chance for a clean and easy victory.

Th worst outcome for Biden, the nation, and democracy would be for Trump to clearly win the primary contests, putting him in the strongest position to win.

Remember, while Biden racked up millions more votes than Trump in 2020, he actually won by only 40 or 50 thousand votes. 2024 could go to Trump with Biden having an even larger popular vote win.

I do not think the court cases, or the criminal charges will seriously damage Trump with the GOP base. These events only ‘prove’ that the liberal system is out to get him, further enhancing the ‘persecuted’ complex of the modern GOP. Nor will he be in jail, even if convicted, he will be free on appeal, as all rich people are, and that appeal process will turn slowly, leaving him free to chase that election.

A Tragic BroMance: The White House Plumbers

HBO Studios

The HBO limited series The White House Plumbers focuses not on the Oval office nor the exhaustive work of the reports who uncovered and revealed the Watergate scandal that ended Nixon’s presidency but rather on the low=level operatives that burgled and spied for the Committee to Re-Elect The President, with particular attention to the flowering and then dying friendship between the G. Gordon Liddy (Justin Theroux) and E. Howard Hunt (Woody Harrelson).

Plumbers is more their story, their meeting, their close and powerful bond, and their eventual falling out which resulted in decades of stony cold silence between the men. It is four episodes of fairly accurate historical farce as bungling bumbling incompetence generates farce that could only have happened because fiction requires believability and history only required reality followed by a fifth episode of Greek tragedy where hubris and flaws destroy the men and utterly transforms the nation.

In addition to Theroux and Harrelson, both turning in fantastic performances, the series boasts a number of talented and amazing performers, Kathleen Turned coming out of her medical retirement to steal an entire episode, Lena Heady as the only real brains of the operation as Hunt’s spook spouse Dorothy ‘Dot’ Hunt, and Irish actor Domhnall Gleeson as the ever-slippery John Dean.

Paired with a companion podcast that not only interviews the creatives behind the series but also illuminates what was historical and what was dramatic, The White House Plumbers presents an under seen and covered aspect of the scandal that destroyed Nixon’s administration shattered that last fragment of a nation’s trust in its institutions. Well worth the five-episode commitment the series reveals that history can be shaped not only by the bold and the brave but also by the stupid and the fanatical.

Head I Win, Tails You Cheated

It has been said that Trump can never lose he can only be cheated, and that is his operating method, he wins every election and contest and when it is declared he did not then that is fraud.

Since 2020 presidential contest where Trump was thankfully thrown out on a slim margin of some 40,000 in just the right places, the Trump cult has been focused on taking over local election boards and altering election laws to allow them to cheat the next contest. It is not only an existential threat of American democracy but to the Republican Party itself.

The GOP, standing aside, too cowardly to confront the monster that they have crafted, seem to believe that this terrible fraud will only be utilized against the Democratic Party, an idiotic short-sighted perspective.

There is talk is this or that GOP pol can beat Trump in the primaries and take the nomination. Trump can never lose be can only be cheated. Any and every primary ‘loss’ will be proof of the ‘Establishment’ and ‘RINOs’ conspiring against Trump. that could be nothing but bitching and complaining but for those local election boards and seats now firmly in the Cult’s control.

I do not know if they hold the power to unquestionably throw the nomination to Trump, but I do know that they will try. The fanatics willing to storm the capitol will have no reservations about the RNC. Even if they cannot by legal means manipulate the results, they will spark a floor fight at the national convention unseen in modern times. If the future of our democracy were not hanging in this balance it would be a time for popcorn. Everyone one of us must vote against every Republican political until the party is burned to the ground, the ground salted, and a new party, undoubtedly with the same name, is constructed.

It is Getting Tougher to Watch Silo

While the series continues to give us good actors, kudos to Rebecca Ferguson for her non-glamorous appearance not something all model quality actors are willing to do, and decent production the continuing failures of world building are making it hard for me to suspend my disbelief in the fictional setting.

This week we learn that things that can’t be recycled or repaired are sent to the incinerators. Really? You have a close ecology, effectively a generation spaceship and you are throwing material over the side? Material that can never ever be replaced.

And where is all this plastic coming from? We see constant used of plastics, and we know it’s been more than 140 years because that was when the ‘rebellion’ occurred. I want to see the plastic oxygen mask that remained clear, perfect, and usable for 140 years.

Eggs? Really, eggs? I am not a vegan or a vegetarian, but I do know that consuming animal products is less efficient that eating the vegetable material directly. In a close ecology with very limited space, it makes no sense whatsoever to spend energy, lights, water pump, cultivation, to grow calories that you then feed to something else and consume the reduced calories from the animal. In the Silo everyone would be vegan or vegetarian.

We also had a reference to ‘burial’ in this episode. Just as with anything else the elements in human bodies are elements you can’t get back if you throw them away. In the Silo everything you eat and breathe would have been at one time a person. You can’t escape the fact that in a closed ecology everything gets recycled or the ecology collapses.

Irresponsible

Actor Robert DeNiro, 79, has fathered a child in an act that strikes me as narcissistically irresponsible. Undoubtedly DeNiro is thrilled and proud to be a father again with a 7th child. There is no question that he possesses the wealth and resources to provide for another kid. But at such an advanced age DeNiro is unlikely to see his offspring mature and it is the child’s emotional health and mental well-being that I find myself thinking on.

Now, it is entirely possible that the emotional scars of losing my own father when I was young has made it difficult or impossible to be dispassionate about such matters, but it is also possible that it has given me a viewpoint thankfully not shared by the majority.

I do not think that DeNiro is showing a great deal of concern for this child. Losing a parent, particularly when one is old enough to grasp the concept of death but still too young to deal with the crushing reality of death is a very hard road to travel. My father dying when I was 10 has impacted me in so many ways and so shaped my emotional relationship with death and dying. Everyone dies is a truth but to have it be an emotional truth at age 10 or so is impactful on ways that are difficult to comprehend. To inflict that on a child as a probable outcome is self-centered to a Trumpian degree.

The Experiment So Far

Just over two weeks ago, May 3rd, I posted about an experiment in my writing as I began a novel without a written outline. My normal process for writing a novel involves extensive notes, outlining, and breaking out all the acts, before I tackle the actual drafting of the book. With this book, working title which is very likely to change The Colors of Their Trade, I have no notes save the once I make as I write, no outline, and a bullet point of six or seven elements to break down the 5-act structure.

As of yesterday, May 18th, I had nearly 10,000 words written for Trade, major characters and relations defined in the text, and narrative momentum that so far has not abandoned me. I believe, perhaps in error, that if I can get the entire 1st act drafted, about 15,000 to 16,000 words then the project will have survived its most critical phase.

Mind you, I am not flying completely by the seat of my pants with this. I have a clear understanding of the five-act structure, 1) establishment, 2) disruption, 3) point of no return, 4) chaos and collapse, and resolution, and what elements are critical this this story’s various acts, that for each act I have a clear destination and goal. That said, while the goal is visible for each act the path to it is not.

This is an experiment in another matter as well. It is a horror novel and I have never written long form prose horror. All of my horror to date has been short fiction and one feature film screenplay that is utter garbage.

I am considering but not yet committed to the idea that when I get act 1 completed that I might show it to a few people and see if it is working as well as it appears to me.

Still, the process continues and only the future knows what it will hold.

A gentle reminder that I have my own SF novel available from any bookseller. Vulcan’s Forge is about the final human colony, one that attempt to live by the social standard of 1950s America and the sole surviving outpost following Earth’s destruction. Jason Kessler doesn’t fit into the repressive 50s social constraints, and he desire for a more libertine lifestyle leads him into conspiracies and crime.

Quick Thoughts on Silo

Premiering on May 5th, 2023, Silo is a limited series adapted from novels by Hugh Howey
concerning a community of 10,000 people surviving a devastated ecology by living underground in a massive silo.

Rebecca Ferguson plays Juliette an engineer from the structures lower levels suddenly pulled into a conspiracy that entangles the silo’s highest citizens, the sheriff, the mayor, and the judge.

Only three episodes have streamed, and it would be unfair and unjust to judge the series’ quality without having seen the final turns and revelations, but I do have a few thoughts.

First off, the production values are first rate. The environment and the setting feel real. There is a palatable sense that this place, with its undetermined age, has seen countless generations of survivors.

Second, the cast is fantastic. Led by Ferguson, who is also a producer for the show, everyone is real and complicated. The actors and their characters are engaging enough to endear attachment from the viewer helping to audience to flow past some of the less that ideal world building.

The less-than-ideal world building comes down to a few key issues.

For dramatic reasons in the 3rd episode Machines Juliette leads a dangerous but unavoidable repair procedure to correct the colony’s single massive generator before it fails and dooms everyone. The idea that the colony was constructed with a single generator, upon which everyone’s survival depended, without even the ability to shut it down for regular maintenance is absurd and a sin against rational engineering. (Not to mention the lack of a relief valve for the geothermal steam that powers the generator.)

Much is made of the vast distance from the top of the silo to its lowest inhabited level with such trips effectively taking an entire day even for the silo’s political leadership. Apparently, the structure has no elevators, which again is absurd considering the large amount of material that would be required to move between levels to sustain a large population.

A close ecology system such as the silo where no new material comes in from the outside would be very fixated on recycling and not wasting a single gram of material. Yet, the colony maintains a tradition that anyone who proclaims that they ‘want to go out,’ is allowed to go outside of the silo to their certain death taking with them kilos of fabric, plastic, and irreplaceable mass. Madness.

All that said I am still intrigues by the series and have some hope it might stick the landing. With conspiracy stories the revelation of the conspiracy is a major element that either contributes to success of failure and only when we reach that final turn can a valid judgement be rendered.

Silo streams on Apple TV+.

Robert Mitchell Evans

Literary Saboteur