Pantser or Planner? 👖📝 🧐 ☺️



Some authors are “planners”, others are “pantsers”. Planners plan their books with outlines etc, pantsers go by the seat of their pants. I stumbled into writing a book and I have been learning how as I go along, pulling up my pants as I lurch forwards.

I started drawing pages and they kept coming. I was drawing to try and make sense of what was going on in my life - contemplating divorce and my dad’s health failing.

Before starting the book, I had drawn one page diary comics for about ten years. I would go out and explore and see what the day had in store and come home with a one page comic. It wasn’t planned, I drew it in rough on the page to see where it would go, the words would follow, then I’d start inking.

Here’s an example:

With my “pantser” approach to writing a book, I drew/ wrote myself into a dead end and couldn’t figure where to go from there. A friend helped me get unstuck and back on track, but I was still working “straight ahead”, one finished page at a time, with no sense of where it was all going - or where my life was going! I hoped the pages would reveal the answers for me, I’d sort out my life, I’d have wisdom to impart, and it would all end with a nice bow! 💝😀

This is a rough page from my book:

Next month we’ll take a look at how this all ended up 10 years later….