What Cthulhu Taught me about Plotting
And what the munchkins taught me about pantsing
Several years ago, I approached each of my friends and said:
"I've come across a tabletop RPG system, Call of Cthulhu. It's like DnD, but instead of levelling up, your character goes insane. Wanna play?"
The number of people who responded "Yes!" continues to baffle me.
We tried Chaosium's free-to-download one-shot, "The Haunting," which went well (for the players, not the characters). Next, I hobbled together a short campaign of my own, which everyone enjoyed (myself, especially). Eventually, we formed a solid enough group to run Chaosium's prize piece, “Masks of Nyarlathotep.” The following months were some of the best tabletop fun I've ever had. A lot of work, to be sure, but also a better education about storytelling than any creative writing class I'd taken. Most especially, it gave me new insights into ye olde plotting vs pantsing debate.
(For those who don't know: "plotters" start with an outline and flesh it out into a story, while "pantsers" write out a full manuscript "by the seat of their pants" and then revise it into a coherent story. The debate between these two groups of writers is fierce and constant.)
Now, when you run a long-term tabletop campaign, there's a paradox that kicks you right in the prep sheet every five seconds:
1) You absolutely must plot the campaign
2) It's impossible to plot the campaign
As a GM, you will never be able to predict what the players do. As you get more skilled, you develop ways of designating options, but you'll never know which option they'll take, and you'd be a fool to underestimate their capacity to think outside the box. You'd also be a fool to try to control the players. It ruins their fun and robs the campaign of its most memorable moments. You have to learn to improvise.
At the same time, you have to be able to tell the players what's behind door number two. It's tempting to think you can trick them. You might think you can put the same thing behind each door, and they'll never know. But your players aren't stupid. They'll figure out what you're doing and find a way to break it. You really do have to build out a world for them to explore and interact with. The end result will break your heart: the players get to experience only a fraction of the world. Countless potential stories will remain untold. But there's a bright side, too: the sense that the world is bigger than what they're seeing is one of the richest gifts you can give your audience. It makes their experience exponentially more immersive and real.
TTRPG (tabletop role playing game) systems work as well as they do because they combine plotting and pantsing elements. As a GM, you're the plotter. You plot the world and its workings, the motions of the main villains, the motives of the NPCs, and so on. You build a solid world of hard rules beneath the players' feet and hang a sky of possibility over their heads.
The players, for their part, are unrepentant pantsers, free to come up with insane-yet-creative ideas that would never have occurred to you.
The better you understand your players, the more able you are to improvise NPC reactions to player shenanigans. The better your players understand the world and its rules, the more creative ways they find to pursue their ends. Over time, plotting and pantsing stop being oil and water and become an admixture of pure storytelling.
There will always be facets of a story that are best served by plotting. Some of these are genre-specific: the rules of a hard magic system, the truth behind a mystery, etc. For all genres, you need to know the physical space in which a story occurs, and you likewise need to establish theme(s)—that is, a clear moral argument.
You might not have thought of theme as a form of plotting, but theme and morality are core components of how your literary world works. As Hemingway put it, "A writer without a sense of justice and of injustice would be better off editing the yearbook of a school for exceptional children than writing novels." Narrative flow is built on cause and effect, and part of a story's value is that we can follow the characters' decisions all the way through to the consequences. It gives us a chance to learn from other people's mistakes and see where the real wins come from. If you're on wishy-washy, undeveloped moral ground, any novel you write will feel more like a self-serving montage of greatest hits than a coherent story. If you're parroting moral arguments that are trendy but false, readers will be repulsed and will likely call you "preachy."
In other words, the world you write into existence is predicated upon some kind of moral law that determines outcomes. You needn't explain that law explicitly in your novel (it will bother readers if you do), but you do need to be clear with yourself about it. You need to be honest with yourself about right and wrong. The more your novel's (unspoken) moral law reflects the workings of the real world, the more your writing resonates with readers. You can stroke a reader's ego by setting an artificial moral law that works the way the reader wishes the real world worked, but the only way to uplift a reader is by working to align your novel's moral law with that of the real world.
To be clear: this isn't an injunction to speak "your truth." Rather, it's an injunction to make your best effort to speak the truth, while humbly acknowledging that we all fail to some extent in our understanding. It's a call to exercise moral courage and take a meaningful risk.
For all this, your characters will never do as you wish, nor should they. Stories are at their most dynamic when the characters feel organic and have a will of their own. So while certain aspects of the world are best plotted, the actual decisions of the characters can only be intuited in the moment. The more you love your characters, the better you are at putting them on the page in all their flawed beauty, and the more we fall in love with them.
If you're like me, you've asked a lot of people what they like in a book, and you've found their answers vary: worldbuilding, escapism, voice, etc. Have you noticed that, once you get a reader to talk about their favorite book, they invariably focus on their favorite characters? Engaging, relatable characters are the single most important thing for the reading experience, and the only way to provide them is to be in-the-moment with those characters as you write them.
In the end, plotting and pantsing are facets of the same gem, which I would term "drafting." I've done my best to articulate the bond between these facets and the way they play with one another, but you might find that something is not quite clicking. If so, I recommend you find a TTRPG group and join. If you already have one, approach them about running a campaign of your own. Once you experience firsthand this interplay of plotting and pantsing, your ability to draft a dynamic story will snap together.