On Skeleton Drafts and Pantsing

This morning, around 10:00 AM, I finished the skeleton draft of a new novella about phantom punches, MMA, and a sailor who desperately wants to impress…well, pretty much everyone, including the reader. It started out as a project that drew inspiration from Robert Howard’s Sailor Steve Costigan stories, but quickly became its own thing. If nothing else, there’s less overt racism and sexism than Howard’s Costigan stories. Also, more starships and space stations.

The skeleton draft is the phase of the project where the story is more-or-less done, but only in my head. In practice, there are scenes where I’ve locked down the major beats and narrative pivots, but haven’t yet locked them down. Or scenes where a secondary character appears for the first time, but doesn’t yet behave like they need to because I don’t know their role in the story until I push towards the final chapter and see their impact. Right now, the biggest unfinished scene is an MMA fight in the front half of the book, where I want to set up things that will play into the climactic moments.

All of which makes it sound like the draft is sparse, but it’s not. It’s sitting around 30,000 words long, and will probably only increase another couple of thousand as I connect things up. The heavy lifting on this one is pretty much done–all the major decisions and plot twists are in place, and all the characters are largely embedded in my skull with a purpose, an approach to solving problems, and a firm idea of their role and voice within the story.

I spent a little time wondering why this always feels like the end of a phase for me, even though there’s still writing to be done. And I think it’s because we’re at the end of the pantsing part: Everything that’s left is just filling in details and stitching things together, instead of making decisions about character and direction. The draft may not be done, but from here there’s much less making stuff up and, to borrow a phrase from Neil Gaiman, much more making it look like I knew what I was doing all along.

Admittedly, the skeleton drafts don’t always look this complete. The first version of Horn, for example, was a six thousand word short story. A twenty-thousand novella was just the result of filling in the gaps and fleshing out backstory, justifying the key scenes I wanted to put the reader through.