Planners and plungers

The writers of fiction seem to fall into two categories. The first group might be called the careful planners, writers who sketch out the architecture of a plot before the first draft begins. The second group comprises the plungers. They see ahead, but just enough to keep going.

Roy Peter Clark, The Art of X-Ray Reading

Roy Peter Clark

From what I've heard authors say in talks and interviews and what I've read about them in books and magazines, I think Roy Peter Clark's distinction between planners and plungers rings true. Some writers do have plots worked out in their minds, if not outlined on paper, before beginning chapter one. Others have only a vague notion of where they are going with a story, or even who the characters will be and how they fit into the plot, when they begin writing. They just wait and see where the story takes them. They let their characters reveal who they are and may be as surprised as their readers to discover how it all comes out.

Movie directors seem to be divided in the same way. Some, like Billy Wilder, start with a script and expect actors to follow it without variation or, like the Coen brothers, storyboard each scene ahead of time. Other directors, Christopher Guest being a notable example, simply set a framework, turn their actors loose and their cameras on, and wait until they get to the editing room to make their movie. Some continue revising their screenplay right up to the end of shooting.

In both literature and film, planners and plungers have created masterpieces, as well as flops. So no method works best for everyone.

Yet I'm wondering if there might not be a third group. At a Writers in Paradise evening last Saturday night in St. Petersburg, short story writer Pam Houston was interviewed by novelist Andre Dubus II. She said, "Half of what I do as a writer is pay attention to the world." She makes lot of notes about what she observes, she said. Then she "waits for something to vibrate." Whatever it is, she builds a story around it, then lets it reveal what it means later as she writes.

This isn't exactly plunging, for there can be years between observation and story. But it isn't exactly planning either, for like plungers Houston can be surprised about what her story is about. Perhaps we might call her a ponderer. She lets things simmer on the back burner of her mind. Sometimes a story comes out. Sometimes not.

Kurt Vonnegut was a prisoner of war in Dresden when the Allies destroyed the city in one bombing raid. He knew he had to write about the experience but had to wait more than 20 years before he knew how to it. The result: Slaughterhouse-Five. He, too, was a ponderer.

Just yesterday I finished reading In the Shadow of the Banyan by Vaddey Ratner. I'll have more to say about the novel later. For now consider that Ratner writes about her own experience as a little girl in Cambodia in the mid-1970s when the Khmer Rouge rebels took over the country and virtually destroyed it, causing the deaths of more than a million people. She thought at first her book would be a memoir, then decided fiction would be the best way to tell her truth. That's about 45 years of pondering and mulling.