Red Green Repeat Adventures of a Spec Driven Junkie

Writing Styles: Pantsers & Plotters - New Rules

After reading an article on writing, it made me reflect on my own writing style. You can find the first article here

After writing weekly for five years, I made the jump to writing daily because of this article, well, technically, this article - yeah, I, may or may not, hang out on Hacker News too much. 😅

Writing every day is a big switch and for me to keep up with a daily pace, I found I cannot plot every article. In fact, I have to even change the rules I use to blog:

Plotting Style:

  • write at least 1000 words
  • post once a week

Pantser Style:

  • write at least 150 words
  • post daily
  • publish article early in the day (more on this later!)

The change from 1000 words to 150 words makes a dramatic difference - I came to this number two ways:

  • Twitter’s tweet limit was 160 characters, so 160 words is at least 5x more!
  • 7 days / week x 150 words / day = 1050 words per week

Overall, the result is the same, but the process to get to the result is dramatically different.

When I write things using the plotting process, I realize I would plot until the deadline.