Some novelists plan the book before writing it. Some find it by writing. Most do some of each, and none of them describe themselves as belonging to a camp.
That last point is not an impression. Across all 254 Art of Fiction interviews in the Paris Review archive, the words "plotter" and "pantser" appear nowhere. The only near-hit is Edmund White calling himself "a weak plotter", which is a self-assessment of skill rather than a category.
The vocabulary is community jargon. The primary record of novelists describing their own working methods does not use it.
The Planners
Iris Murdoch is the most absolute:
"Well, I think it is important to make a detailed plan before you write the first sentence. Some people think one should write, George woke up and knew that something terrible had happened yesterday, and then see what happens. I plan the whole thing in detail before I begin. I have a general scheme and lots of notes. Every chapter is planned. Every conversation is planned."
Note even she has a second phase: "The second stage is that one should sit quietly and let the thing invent itself."
John Irving ties planning to endings:
"I love plot, and how can you plot a novel if you don't know the ending first? ... All the important discoveries, at the end of a book, those are the things I have to know before I know where to begin."
And he answers the usual objection to outlining directly, which is why this is the most useful quote on the page:
"I believe you have constructive accidents en route through a novel only because you have mapped a clear way. ... The more you know about a book, the freer you can be to fool around. The less you know, the tighter you get."
Vladimir Nabokov describes something more specific than planning, which is structure without sequence:
"The pattern of the thing precedes the thing. I fill in the gaps of the crossword at any spot I happen to choose. These bits I write on index cards until the novel is done."
The Discoverers
William Maxwell gives the clearest reason for refusing an outline:
"...if I saw the whole unwritten novel stretching out before me, chapter by chapter, like a landscape, I know I would put it aside in favor of something more uncertain, material that had a natural form that it was up to me to discover. So I never work from an outline. ... But in general the thing creeps along slowly, like a mole in the dark."
The argument is that a fully visible book stops being interesting enough to write.
James Thurber stages the disagreement inside a single answer, recalling a collaborator asking what to do next:
"I'd say that I didn't know and couldn't tell him until I'd sat down at the typewriter and found out. I don't believe the writer should know too much where he's going. If he does, he runs into old man blueprint, old man propaganda."
E. L. Doctorow supplies the most quoted line in this whole debate, and it is worth getting right because the version in circulation is wrong:
"I tell them it's like driving a car at night: you never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way."
The common paraphrase, "you can only see as far as your headlights", both misquotes it and usually drops the second clause, which carries the entire point. The image is not about limitation. It is about sufficiency.
Martin Amis is blunter about the planned model:
"The common conception of how novels get written seems to me to be an exact description of writer's block. ... In fact, it's never like that."
The Middle, Which Is Where Most People Are
Anthony Burgess, asked whether each book is charted in advance:
"I chart a little first, list of names, rough synopsis of chapters, and so on. But one daren't overplan; so many things are generated by the sheer act of writing."
Peter Taylor describes the plan changing under him:
"I know one ending. But before I've worked on a story very long I know another. ... I often reverse my understanding in the course of writing a story."
Italo Calvino offers a genuinely different third position, which is to outline seriously and then throw it away:
"I spend a lot of time constructing a book, making outlines that eventually prove to be of no use to me whatsoever. I throw them away. What determines the book is the writing, the material that's actually on the page."
That is worth sitting with. The outline did its work by being written, not by being followed.
What This Suggests
It is a spectrum, not a binary. Murdoch plans every conversation and still waits for the thing to invent itself. Burgess charts a little and distrusts more.
The outline may be a thinking tool rather than a map. Calvino's outlines were useless as instructions and evidently not useless to write.
Knowing the ending is a separate question from outlining. Irving needs the ending first and Taylor expects his to reverse.
Neither camp claims spontaneity. Irving's argument is that planning produces "constructive accidents", which is the opposite of the usual framing.
The practical read: try both on something short, notice which one produces pages, and stop treating it as an identity. None of these novelists did.
What Deckle Does
Both approaches are supported, which is not a dodge: they need different features.
For planning, the Outliner and corkboard let you build a structure of chapters and scenes with synopses before writing any prose, then write into it. The Timeline does the same for chronology.
For discovery, the structure is not a commitment. Documents reorder by dragging, and a scene written in the wrong place moves without cutting and pasting text.
For Calvino's approach, an outline you may discard costs nothing to build and nothing to abandon.
The one feature that serves both is the synopsis field. Filled in before writing it is a plan; filled in afterwards it is a reverse outline, which is the most recommended revision technique there is. Same field, opposite directions.
Common Mistakes
- Adopting an identity. No novelist in the archive describes themselves as a plotter or a pantser.
- Quoting Doctorow's headlights line as a limitation. He said you can make the whole trip that way.
- Assuming outlining kills spontaneity. Irving argues the opposite, and so does Murdoch's practice.
- Assuming discovery means no preparation. Burgess charts names and rough chapters first.
- Treating an unused outline as wasted. Calvino threw his away by design.
- Deciding once. Several of these writers changed method between books.
FAQ
Q: Which approach is better? A: Neither. Named novelists at both extremes produced major work, and most describe a mixture.
Q: Where do "plotter" and "pantser" come from? A: Not from novelists describing their own work. The terms appear in none of the 254 Paris Review interviews.
Q: Do I need to know the ending before I start? A: Irving says he must. Taylor expects his to reverse. Genuinely a matter of temperament.
Q: Is an outline wasted if I do not follow it? A: Calvino's outlines "prove to be of no use to me whatsoever" and he still made them.
Q: Can I switch mid-book? A: Yes, and it is common. Murdoch plans exhaustively, then lets the book invent itself.