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“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.