Stephen King and the Pantsing vs. Plotting Debate

Hint: there is no debate.

With his advocacy of so-called “pantsing,” Stephen King has probably ruined more writers than Jim Beam has. On the off chance you’re not familiar with the term, pantsing refers to writing a novel “by the seat of your pants,” i.e., making it up as you go, eschewing the constraints of a pre-planned outline, whether detailed or general, and denying yourself any concrete insights into your story’s overall arc or specific future events. The thinking behind this is, you develop a more organic and “true” story by letting the peculiarities of your characters, and the factors of your constructed world, be the soil from which your series of events—unfortunate and otherwise—grows.

Here’s the thing, though. Stephen King, as he will tell you, is an insatiable reader, and had read presumably a few thousand books by the time he sold his first story. So residing in Stephen King’s head are a million dos and don’ts regarding all facets of story mechanics. In other words, Stephen King has never pantsed a novel in his life—or at least a novel that saw daylight. What he did was go in his little office, slap in his AC/DC cassette, and set down stories that, by coincidence, manifested all the properly developed characters, hit all the necessary “plot beats,” and shaped up into the arcs that any decent writing-craft book would have advised.

Ultimately, you see, there is no pantser/plotter divide. There are just people who plot by instinct, and people who plot in three-dimensional reality. The end result is the same. A story—leaving aside experimental “literature”—has to present 1) a convincing world containing convincing characters who have convincing reasons for their actions and 2) character actions that create tension and alter their circumstances in such a way that the reader’s interest is maintained through to the story’s conclusion.

What’s often left out of Stephen King’s pantsing advocacy is that, his Twitter feed notwithstanding, he’s a genius, and possibly a neurodivergent obsessive. He spends months and months of long days in, as he has said, a “fugue state,” inhabiting his invented worlds and familiarizing himself with his invented people and vampires. He’s able to pants his novels because his level of focus and internalized knowledge of what stories ought to do are—unlike yours and mine—so formidable that his improvisations work. A lesser mind, undertaking something like The Stand, or even—or maybe especially—The Long Walk without sufficient foresight, would likely produce a pile of not just unpublishable, but uneditable, shit.

And speaking of editing, that factor kind of nukes the whole pantsing concept. If one makes anything like structural changes to their pantsed work based on private reassessment or reader/editor feedback, one is simply plotting after the fact. And if one doesn’t make such changes, and one’s novel is legitimately pantsed, then in all but the rarest of cases the result is, you guessed it, a pile of shit—even if one is Stephen King. In On Writing, King plainly tells us he’s not really a pantser; he’s a plotter after the fact. He pantses Draft One, comes back to it after a month or two, and then views it in the cold light of day and makes not just prose adjustments, but structural changes. He tunes up or cuts characters, and closes plot holes “big enough to drive a truck through.” Then he hands it off to readers, and based on their feedback eliminates any other instances of getting caught with his “fly unzipped,” as he describes it. Then, of course, it goes to some editor, or a number of editors, at a million-dollar publishing house, and any other flubs are eliminated. That’s a hell of a lot of other-than-pantsing.

And again, his pantsing adventure wasn’t really pantsing. His Draft One was at the level of the average writer’s Draft Ten. That’s why he’s Stephen King.

What does this mean for the rest of us? Simply this: nobody’s interested in our half-formed characters groping their ways through haphazard plots. If we lack anything resembling Stephen King’s mental horsepower, we’d better make up for it with conscientiousness. Any novel worth reading represents a convergence of two things: what we can summarize as raw talent—the author’s God-given ability to convince and entertain over an extended period—and the deliberate application of craft. Chances are, you’re short on the former to a greater extent than you’d like to think. And to whatever extent that is, you’d better lean into the latter. That may mean pre-planning or major surgery after the fact, or both. It’s all the same. One way or another, you’ve got to do what Stephen King actually does—take whatever steps are necessary to avoid making a fool of yourself.

But hey, I’m pantsing this piece of writing, so take it for what’s it’s worth. If you can wing it and come up with something readable, don’t let me stop you. If you’re hitting walls and can’t figure out why, it may have something to do with the above. If the whole thing is making your head hurt, there’s always Jim Beam.