As a writer; are you a pantser or a planner?

For you readers out there, perhaps you don't know or care about the difference.

But for the sake of this blog let's get into it.

A pantser flies by the seat of their pants and makes up stuff as they go along, letting the story flow naturally... sometimes from their subconscious. Whereas a planner makes outlines of every scene from A to Z. For my YA novel, Under the Family Tree, I used a combination of the two. Since I was writing a mystery novel, I outlined timelines of certain events so that I could drop tiny clues throughout the story. But mostly I wrote and wrote and wrote, and followed where the story took me. And if I came to a fork in the road, I wasn't afraid to take it.

In fact... the biggest plot twist in my novel, came to me after waking up at 5 in the morning, and it changed the entire trajectory of the story.

Oh... did you think I was going to tell you what that was?

Sorry.

Is anybody out there?
Gary Feinstein
https://www.garyfeinstein.com/