Writing Style Alignments (+ awkward shilling)

     So, not too long ago, someone posted this "Writing Style Alignment" chart in a Discord server where I (mostly) lurk.  I thought it was something interesting(?) to talk about, so...

    What really strikes me about this is how I don't fit in any of those boxes.  I have elements of "Lawful Pantser," "Lawful Plantser," "True Plantser" and even "Neutral Plotter."

    So, let's look at those in sequence here.

• "Writes everything in order"
• This is 100% me.  If I try to write things out of order, it just doesn't work.  In the past I used to write little snippets as they came to me and then sew them into the narrative when I got there, but I eventually had to give up on that practice because it pretty much never worked out well.  Because so many little details change as I'm going along through the story that by the time I get to whatever scene I pre-wrote, various things no longer worked about it. 
          This is also why I hate having to go back and add in stuff to a scene later on, because the flow gets terminally wrecked by the addition.  For example, on "A Hidden Road," I realized belatedly that I needed Wei Wuxian's faith in his relationship with Lan Wangji briefly shaken by something someone had said to him (in order for it to be strengthened by a reassurance, of course), but I had gotten to the end of the first draft without ever having that moment, so I had to add that in on the second draft, and the only good place for it was in a late night conversation they already had on a different topic.  So I had him lying awake worrying about their relationship...and then had him want to talk about it, but try to start out on a "lighter" topic that ended up preventing his intended topic.  Which is to say they ended up having the same conversation they did originally, and it just started for different reasons.  Awkward af.
• "Uses the flashlight method to get to the end"
• I have no idea what the "flashlight method" even is.
• "Ends up in strange places"
• Nope.  I usually have a pretty strong idea of where I'm going by the time I actually start writing.  I may pass through some pretty unexpected places on the way there, but I typically get roughly the ending I was always aiming for.
          Though sometimes some things change.  Like on "A Hidden Road" I ended up changing who the villain was because as I went along I realized that the villain I had planned on using didn't really have much motivation to be villainous left after a few of the details I added in earlier scenes, so I made the henchman into the villain and the original villain into more of a red herring.  Or in "Scions of Troy," a character who started out as a minor role became one of Ariadne's potential future girlfriends.  (Which is to say that she's obviously interested and Ariadne seems a little interested.  But she's not scheduled to show up in any of the later books...though given the way I write, that could always change...)  But the larger picture of the ending in both cases (which can be summed up as "heroes triumphant") remained the same.
• "knows random details no one else cares about"
• Um...probably?  But really that sort of applies to the main story, as no one cares about what I write in the first place.

• "Knows the ending, writes towards it"
• Yup, this is absolutely me, 100%.
• "loves to worldbuild"
• Enh, not so much.  I like making up a few trivial details about the world, but mostly that requires a mind for the medium picture that I don't possess.  (Y'know the saying "misses the forest for the trees"?  That's totally me:  I see the trees and I see the continent, but I don't see the forest.  Can't, in fact.  It's part of the same mental block that prevents me visualizing things, I think.  (But I'm not sure about that.)  Hmm.  Actually, maybe it would  be better to say that I can see the forest and the leaves, but not the trees?  Well, you get the gist of what I'm saying either way, I hope.)
• "uses character bios/has definitely taken personality tests for their characters"
• Nope.  I've sometimes tried character bios, but I can't think up enough of the needed details on command for them to be useful; I kinda have to just summon up those details out of the ether as I write. 😅  I may have tried personality tests once or twice (probably for Atalanta and Ariadne), but typically I don't know enough about my characters' weird details and/or too much doesn't apply to them, so it would be wasted effort.  (For example, a common question on those sort of things is something along the lines of "how do they take their coffee?"  Which I can't really answer under any circumstances, 'cause I don't drink the stuff, but I might be able to make a half-hearted guess for someone in a modern setting, but for someone in an ancient setting?  Atalanta and Ariadne have never even heard of coffee, so how could I possibly answer that?  (The same would apply to the entire cast in any MDZS fanfic, outside of a modern AU.))

• "Starts an outline"
• Yup, often the case.  Or rather unless it's gonna be super-short, I'll at least have a paragraph or two summarizing what I want to do in the story.  Sometimes it gets expanded into a proper outline, or at least the early portions, and sometimes that doesn't happen for a while.  My outlines generally are more detailed at the start and eventually peter out into vagaries like "the war happens" "they win" "epilogue i guess?"
• "goes off script and ends up in unexpected places."
• Enh...sort of?  I mean, it's more like little details that get added in change the trajectory, but it's typically a pretty slight change.  Like the change to "A Hidden Road" I mentioned above about the villain change:  that happened because of one line that one character happened to say that opened the would-have-been villain's eyes to the fact that hey, maybe he shouldn't hate everyone quite so much, but the new villain's agenda wasn't much different than the old villain's would have been, so the actions the heroes take in response are pretty similar to what they always would have been.  Or this brief Dragonji story I wrote because it was screaming at me to write it (despite that I'm in the middle of a Jiang Cheng-centric, massively-long, CQL-based AU), which I started out with the assumption that after a certain, very early point I was gonna have to go look for a co-writer so it could turn into smut, only then I just had this one tiny, very canon-accurate moment where dragon-in-human-form Lan Wangji gets flustered on seeing an underclad Wei Wuxian, and it just seemed like so much more fun to have it turn into a more slow (and mercifully consensual) romance than the smutty thing it had originally been building towards.  But the "happily gay ever after" ending is still the same, so it's not that I ended up somewhere unexpected, just that I passed through an unexpected place.
• "but that's okay cause this is more interesting anyway"
• My fingers are itching to fix that, but it's a quote so I can't go in and add the apostrophe that needs to be in front of "cause."
          Anyway, that's not totally an actual point?  But I mean, yeah, my diversions from the original plan do tend to be more fun/interesting than whatever I had originally intended, but surely that would be the case for anyone who decides to pursue an alternate to their original plan, because why would they deviate from the plan if it was less interesting to do so?  (Though I guess it's debatable about that Dragonji story.  The smutty version probably would have been a lot more fun to read, but trying to find and work with someone else to get the smutty part written would have been anything but fun.)

• "Brief outline"
• Yup, definitely.  At least to start with.
• "Likes to use beat sheets"
• I don't think I ever even used those back when I was studying screenwriting in grad school.
• "Modifies and updates outline as they go."
• Yup, absolutely.  My outline for a long piece like the one I'm currently working on (over 160k at this point) becomes sheer chaos, but that's okay, because I mostly only consult the paragraph or two describing the next however many scenes.  (Right now, that paragraph is...actually, there's two sets of them.  One describes the next major push of the Sunshot Campaign, and the other outlines the whole rest of the war.  After which the rest of the fic will happen.  (The outline for that part is fuzzier, but the current plan (which will likely not change!) is for Jin Guangshan to be the big bad.)  Absurdly, I think I originally intended the post-Sunshot Campaign part to be the bulk of the fic. 😰)
• "Thinks about writing character bios, rarely does"
• Yeah, actually, that fits me pretty well. 😅

        In the end, I'm not sure what it means that none of the squares really fits me, or that I come close to fitting into boxes of all three of the major types.  I'm not sure if that says there's something weird about me as a writer, or if it means the person who made this chart doesn't quite grasp the way other people write.  I feel like after this got posted the only people who talked about it said they didn't quite fit any of the choices, so I think the person who made it missed their guess about how it should work.

    Anyway, it seemed something interesting to talk about, so I thought I'd talk about it. 🤣

    (If anyone out there is confused about the whole "alignment" thing, these charts are sort of a meme, inspired by the D&D alignment charts of Lawful/Neutral/Chaotic and Good/Neutral/Evil, with the center block being True Neutral.)