Planner or Pantster
How I Research for my Books or Writing Projects
I find it amusing at times being a part of the author community. As an author, we all have our way of how we go about writing a book or a story. There are the planners and the pantsters. I think I’m a good combination of both ideas.
I mostly fly by the seat of my pants with my writing. I’m not one who will sit down and stay there until an idea comes to my mind. I hear of some authors who crank out multi thousand words a day. My brain just doesn’t work that way. Most of my books that are published, in the process of being published or are waiting in a file to be published have come to me out of the blue.
My book Excuse Me Sir, Do You Bark English? came to me after my dog Little Bear got out of our garden while living in the Netherlands. We had just found my beloved little boy and I was crying in the backyard as he happily played. I was hugging him and letting him lick my face with puppy kisses when a poem about the situation came tumbling out of my head. We went inside and I wrote it all down. I originally posted it to my blog that I was writing about living in the Netherlands. After a month or two of loving this poem, I decided I wanted to publish it as a book. This is how my book career began, by the seat of my pants.
My book that is in the process of being published right now came about in kind of the same way. Years after my little poem started a fire within my soul to write, I created a publishing company called Blueberry Pancake Publishing. I can not tell you how many people every day ask me about the name of my company every day. The name of my company came from the love I had/have for my grandmother. Annie Laurie, died almost 30 years ago. This quiet, little lady still plays a very important part of my life. She is the person I model myself after in the raising of my own grandchildren and yes, she made me blueberry pancakes as a child at my childhood cabin in Michigan. The book that is in the process of being published takes place in that cabin where she and her best friend would take 6 children to stay for a week or two at a time. The idea for this book happened when my sister asked me how I came up with the name Blueberry Pancake Publishing.
I said it was because Grandma used to make us blueberry pancakes at the cottage. She said she didn’t get pancakes and that they had to eat toast. I won’t give anything else away, but from that innocent conversation came the most precious book. I can’t wait to share it with you all. This story was made with love, a pinch of chocolate and a lot of flying by the seat of my pants.
Flying by the seat of my pants one time led me to discover two very kind gentlemen whose mother had taken into hiding a Jewish neighbor during World War II. I was writing a blog about a festival in Eindhoven, the Netherlands called Lichtjesroute. It was when I had first moved to the Netherlands, and everything was still very confusing. This festival was kind of Christmas looking with lights all over, but it was September. I drove around with my husband all over town taking pictures to share of the festival and then guess what happened? I became the planner. I didn’t know enough about the festival to write about it and let my readers understand. If I didn’t understand, how could they? It was through educating myself, that I became a planner. I discovered that the light festival was in celebration of the liberation of Eindhoven during World War II.
Upon my study of this festival, I came upon a picture of a mother with her child smiling in front of American troops that had just landed in Holland liberating them from Germany. I wanted to use this precious picture but thought I had better check with the owner, just to make sure it was ok. I wasn’t even expecting them to still be alive. I wrote to them via the website and within a half an hour the little boy in the photo was e mailing me back. I will stop this story here but needless to say, the pantser became the planner for the remainder of that story. It’s such a wonderful story and I will share it with you all in my book that I’m writing about my memoirs.
What about you? Do you plan or do you fly by the seat of your pants?
Blueberry Pancake Publishing 