S1E7 Pantsing/Genesis Duran

Hello friends! Welcome back to the Inked Blog Episode Recap! Our guest for this episode was Miss Genesis Duran, who discussed her experiences with pantsing. Let’s jump right into the questions and her responses!

1. How would you describe pantsing?

“For me, pantsing is just coming up with ideas on the spot, and just kind of discovering the story as you’re writing the book. It’s not really that you know what’s going to happen, but you don’t at the same time.”

2. Why do you prefer to pants a story than to plan it out?

“I hate planning my story out, but I don’t know why, it’s just, like, very boring to me…I prefer pantsing because…I get to discover my story, so I feel like it’s much more fun like that, because I get to piece the things together as I’m writing the story; whereas if you plot, you have to put the outline first, and I think [it’s] just easier for my brain, since I already have the plot in my head, so it’s just easier for me to just go off of that and just immediately go to writing. And I don’t really care about the editing process at that moment; I can just rewrite the story later, and I don’t mind that.”

3. When it comes to pantsing, what do you think the hardest part of being a pantser is?

“I think there’s two things that are actually pretty hard: it’s that you get writer’s block I think a lot more than plotters do, and you just have so many ideas that you kind of just have to ignore them when you’re writing on one thing. Because if you start letting those ideas get to you, and you don’t, like, write them down, it just kind of gets overwhelming, and you just wanna start writing those stories. I mean, I know everyone does, but I think specifically for like, people that pants, it’s like you get so many ideas and you just can’t focus on your story because you can’t get the ideas for your story.”

4. How do your stories tend to progress, being a pantser?

“The best way I can give an example is that it’s kind of like thinking of a movie. So in my brain, it’s more like a movie than a story. And in my brain, it’s like I think of the scenes…sometimes I’ll be listening to music, and I’ll just come up with a scene for a story…These scenes, they just come randomly, so like I could have a scene that goes in the middle of the story, I could have a scene that just starts at the beginning.”

5. Do you have one big piece of advice that you’d give to someone who’s a new writer who may wanna try pantsing and see if it works better for them?

“I think, like, if you wanna try it, go ahead. Like, dive right into it, because ultimately that’s what we do, like we get an idea and we just go for it. Having a notebook, so…wherever you go you continue writing, watching videos, seeing writing prompts, you just have to get that creativeness to start coming from you, because I know that sometimes you can start losing that imagination as you get older, but the whole point of being an pantser is you need to have more creativeness, more imagination from anything.”

That’s all for this week’s recap, but we hope to see you next week! Bye y’all!

-Sophia Wheeler (Writer)