Slow and Fast Pools
The Many Stages of Editing a Novel, Beyond Plotting and Pantsing
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Doll Parts, my debut novel (Sourcebooks Landmark, August 26, 2025) is available to pre-order!
By the time you read this, my son’s swim season will have ended. This is a big deal, not just because we have spent most days out of the last two months at swim practice or at swim meets or at swim-related social events (Breakfast of Champions, Ice Cream Night, Pizza Party, Swim Banquet), but also because I volunteered to be on the swim team “executive board” this year and even though I haven’t swam a single lap, I am exhausted.
It was a good season for my son. That’s all he would want me to say about that. To share my own personal wins during this season, I edited a lot of pages (and turned in my second novel to my editor). I drafted countless essays or short pieces that hope to see the light of day soon. I promoted my book online, recorded podcast interviews, attended book events, and traveled to a big conference—all scheduled around swim.
This means that I have picked up on a few phrases that swimmers use. My favorite: slow and fast pools. As in, “this is a fast pool” or “this pool is really slow.”
On a really hot day, for example, where swimmers are feeling sluggish as they wait for their next event at an outdoor pool where the water feels like a bath tub, they might say, “this pool is so slow.” At these pools, swimmers may add time rather than cut.
At a fast pool, the temperature is just right, the depth of the pool doesn’t hinder anyone’s starts or turns. Spectators might watch a backstroke heat, for example, and say, “Wow, that looked fast.”
It’s apparently more scientific than that. We’re talking about everything from pool depth to the amount of waves in certain lanes, and the quality of the blocks where swimmers start. I am a swim parent, not a swimmer, so I won’t pretend to know more than this.
But I am also a writer, which means I simply love the phrasing of “slow pools” and “fast pools.” I like the way it sounds. And I like the metaphor of it. As a writer on deadline, someone who has been editing while also drafting, I’ve been in a slow pool all summer.
A slow pool for me means that even though I’m on deadline and working faster than I usually would, the work feels tedious and sometimes unproductive. The results at the end of a writing session feel “meh” rather than “holy hell, look what I just did.” My slow pool of drafting a second novel feels like a swim practice after not enough sleep and too many Sour Skittles, rather than a well-rested, well-hydrated swim meet.
But isn’t that what drafting is supposed to be like? It isn’t supposed to be perfect. It’s why we tell writers not to compare their rough drafts to someone else’s finished product. A draft is moldable clay. Something about it works enough to keep hacking away at it, but those final results come much later.
Okay, I’ll stop it with the swim talk. Let me put it this way: all of this drafting while editing/revising on a deadline has made me think a lot about plotting and pantsing, two terms I struggle with.
A lot of online writing conversations center around discussions of plotting and pantsing. These were not terms I knew about twenty years ago when I was in grad school, but now they are unavoidable. For many writers, the label of Plotter (the planner, the outliner) or Pantser (the one who flies by the seat of their pants) has become part of their writing identity. They signify something about an individual’s writing process, and about them as individual creators.
Talk to enough writers, though, and you’ll quickly find that nothing is so black and white. First, our writing process can change from project to project. Just like we change as we gain experience, both in writing and in life, how we approach a creative project can shift. Hell, my process can change depending on the (swim) season or the phases of the moon, or where I am in the semester, if I’m deadline, and on and on.
As it turns out, the kind of writer I am depends on where I am in the process. And there are more parts of the process than “revising” and “editing.”
Part of the problem with labels in which there are only two options is that it automatically simplifies the thing being labeled.
Yes, some writers always write in one way and might never need or want to change that method. But, in my experience (as a writer and as a writing teacher), it isn’t quite so clear cut for the rest of us. It’s not like saying, “I’m an introvert” (or extrovert), which may feel like a more fixed personality trait (I’ve been introverted my whole life, but the rest of my personality type, on the whole, has changed, as I think it does for many people).
The other hiccup with labels like Plotting and Pantsing is that many writers (all writers?) are too complex to fit into one single category. What about the writers who are somewhere in between (plantsing?) or who find that both labels, or neither of these labels, resonates?
I’m using the word “label” here for lack of a better term, but maybe it helps me make my larger point. Like many of you reading this, I am hard-programmed to resist a label when it comes to talking about myself.
As I drafted Book 2 on a deadline made tighter by my full-time job, I think I figured out the real reason why terms like Plotting and Pantsing make me a little itchy. It’s because they only seem to fit how I approach a first draft.
The bulk of my writing time—let’s say 80% of it—is in revision, not drafting. And when I’m revising, anything goes.
For Book 2 (title incoming very soon, I promise), I wrote a synopsis early on that changed more than once. I tried an outline only after the first draft was finished. I sketched out tricky scenes to help me get a handle on them, but I also sat down and wrote in a new blank document for hours without any map at all.
Each day, the project told me how to approach it, if I was willing to listen. And since I expect many more rounds of revision once my editor delivers her notes, I know I will try even more techniques to get to the finished product. I’ll probably print out the whole manuscript at least once. I’ll work in Word, but also Google Docs. I’ll handwrite notes to myself and try notecards and color-coded spreadsheets. I’ll work early in the quietest slice of morning, but also at busy, loud swim practices.
It won’t feel like pantsing or plotting, but instead like some maddening/magical space in between.
One more thing: as we get closer to the pub date for Doll Parts, I am more thankful than ever for all of your support, including the agreement to receive emails from me. As emails increase leading up to August 26, my gratitude grows by the day.
ICYMI: There is an audiobook for Doll Parts, set to release on August 26, too. You can pre-order at places like B & N and Amazon/Audible.
Wishing you lots of good summer reading this summer,
Penny
Pre-order Doll Parts, forthcoming from Sourcebooks Landmark, August 26, 2025
Substack, Mourning Pages
https://www.pennyzang.com/
The Virgin Suicides meets I Have Some Questions For You in a dual timeline suspense following one woman as she begins to uncover the truth of the death of her estranged best friend and the Sylvia Plath adoring sad girls they attended college with decades ago, all while holding a secret that will slowly unravel her new, suburban dream life.
Told in a dual timeline, Doll Parts is a provocative and irresistible debut, at once an exploration of the dark the chasms that break apart friendships, an ode to the aching beauty of girlhood, and a sharp portrayal of grief that can physically haunt you.
Love this -- and I agree that the project often tells us...
Such an interesting perspective. I suppose I always assumed that when the time arrives to edit/start draft 2, I’d give up my plantsing ways and be very methodical and plotting. Maybe not!
Can’t wait to hear about your book 2!