Planning and Pantsing Your Novel with Scrivener

Scrivener is designed so all writers – whether they plan in advance or write by the seat of their pants – can write a novel in a flexible environment.

Writing a novel takes a long time. Some authors like to prepare in advance, before they start writing, by outlining, determining the structure of their novel, making notes about characters and settings, and getting all the elements of their story ready before writing. Others create a new Scrivener project and just start writing. They develop characters as they write, they come up with plot points and twists as they progress, and they let their instincts guide them.

Neither process is wrong; it depends on the writer. But with Scrivener, you can do both. You can plan your novel in advance, or you can be a pantser, someone who writes "by the seat of their pants," just winging it. Here’s how to do both.

Planning with Scrivener

Planning a novel can be complicated. You have to come up with a plot, characters, and setting, and you need to think about how the novel will be structured. You may want to work with a story structure model, such as the hero’s journey or Save the Cat! (See Five Books to Help Understand Story Structure to discover some story structure ideas). Or you may have your own system for structuring your work.

To think of this process, you might look at how some people cook. You start with a recipe, and you prepare all your ingredients in advance. You chop and dice, puree and squeeze, and put everything in bowls or on plates. You get all your herbs and spices ready, along with other ingredients, such as butter, oil, and wine. Then you start cooking. All you have to do is add the ingredients at the right time and follow the recipe.

Of course, cooking is very different from writing, and recipes are important to ensure that your food is cooked correctly. Preparing everything in advance means that at each step of the recipe, you can add or cook the ingredients without taking any extra time. But it doesn’t mean that you don’t make changes or improvise as you progress with your dish.

With Scrivener, you can do all this preparatory work before you start writing. You can create an outline and view it in the Outliner, Corkboard, and Binder. The way these three tools integrate means that you can find the ideal way to see how your project is built.

You can prepare your characters using Scrivener’s Character sketches. You can make extensive notes about each character that you can refer back to when needed. And you can use Setting Sketches to do the same for your settings. You can even add photos to both of these types of files, if you have ideas of what your characters look like, or if you’re using real settings and want images to remind you what they look like.

Once you’ve done all this, you can start writing, using the Binder, which reflects your outline, to move ahead with your story.

Pantsing with Scrivener

Not everybody outlines, and some people even think you should never outline. Lee Child highlights the importance of character and voice, and says, "Ditch the plan. Ditch the plot. Just start writing."

Sometimes, an outline can box you in. Peter Robinson, author of the Inspector Banks mystery series, told me, in the first episode of the Write Now with Scrivener Podcast, "I don’t do a plan; I’m not an outliner. I do make a lot of notes of possible scenes. I usually begin in my mind with a very visual opening scene. I rarely if ever know what the ending’s going to be or how I’m going to get there."

If you write that way, Scrivener is the ideal tool. You can use the Binder to create files and folders for scenes and chapters, and, as you progress, you may not even write in a linear manner. As you write more scenes, you may want to jump ahead or back and rearrange what happens in your novel; Scrivener’s Binder is designed for that. Sometimes you may want to split or merge chapters, if chapters are too long or too short, and these are features that Scrivener offers.

As you progress, pantsing your way to the denouement of your novel, you can take advantage of the Outliner and Corkboard, to view a map of where you’ve been. This allows you to get a bird’s-eye view of your novel as it progresses, even if you don’t use these tools to plan your structure. But when you get far enough ahead in your story, you may want to mark out a few scenes that you now know you need to write, and you can use these tools to prepare the ground.

Scrivener offers both planners and pantsers the tools they need to write a novel. The flexibility of Scrivener’s three main elements – the Binder, Outliner, and Corkboard – allow any writer to work the way they prefer, and character and setting sketches provide repositories for additional information. In addition, the Research folder, which is in the Binder, is a place where both planners and pantsers can store information about their novels, which could be photos, PDFs, web pages, and even audio and video files. All this background information that authors may use in their pre-writing research is easily accessible and searchable within Scrivener.

So plan ahead or pants; it’s up to you. Scrivener has tools for every writing method.