Plots & Pants: The Great Equalizer of the Game Mastering

One of the most popular writing taxonomies that has arisen over the years is the “Plotter versus Pantser” dynamic. It’s this understanding that writers tend to either be meticulous planners that create a solid foundation and have a clear direction of where everything is headed from the beginning, a.k.a. a plotter…OR…they tend to firing from the hip, writing off the cuff, and otherwise just flying by the seat of their pants, hence the name pantser. And like any binary taxonomy, very few writers actually strictly adhere to a particular philosophy and then to be more “Plansters” or as I like to refer to it “Planters” (an ironic moniker given that I have whatever the proverbial opposite of a green thumb is) where a framework is created and then you sort of see what happens.

Hollow Lands

That being said, different mediums do tend to be easier for a plotter or pantser. Traditionally, a plotter tend to do well in longer, more structured format. Fiction and nonfiction in particular tend to benefit from having a set structure, a well understood and defined outlook of the story being told or reported. Screenplays, teleplays, scripts also tend to attract plotters as the famous Chekov’s Gun often reminds us. However, that’s not necessarily a hard and fast rule. Short stories for example may not need as much of a coherent framework, and a writer can riff through them rather than painstakingly plotting every detail. Something like National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo for short) ca…