Are you a pinch cook? Or a recipe cook? Or a little of both? Or a non-cook? 
I define a pinch cook as a cook who walks into the kitchen examines the ingredients in her pantry and fridge and comes up with a meal that she creates, kind of like a ‘play by ear’ musician. A pinch of this and a pinch of that=pinch cook. Or do you only like to cook from recipes that you carefully select from favorite cookbooks, family favorites or food show? Or both? Or not at all?
I recently asked this question on my blog and got almost 40 responses. If you’d like to read them, click here. Wow-what a lot of different ways of cooking. And how’s that related to writing anyway?
Have you heard the terms: PANTSTER? PLOTTER? TWEENER? These are terms that authors use to describe how they approach writing a piece of fiction. And it creates a lot of kerfuffle—I mean discussion among authors. 
A pantster just sits down and starts writing. A plotter sits down and plans out the book and then starts writing. A tweener does a bit of both. So which am I?
Well, I think every author I’ve ever spoken to started out as a pantster. A story idea occurs to her and she sits down and writes it. But after she sells a book, an editor demands that she write a proposal—a description of the books characters and plot and then write the first few chapters in order to sell another. So then the plotter comes to the fore. In the end I think most of us become tweeners, doing a bit of both. I just finished writing my 50th book and I’ve kind of reverted to pantster. Especially since I am not writing for a publishing house any more. Now I’m an indie.
Next month we’ll discuss three new terms: trad, hybrid and indie. Tune in and read the scoop!
My newest book, Precarious Summer, was written in the tweener-mode. Hope you’ll take a look at it. —Lyn Cote
5 stars — “Precarious Summer sucked me in immediately. I loved Audra and her determination. Lyn Cote’s characters are all so vividly portrayed, they are old friends by the time the book ends. There is family drama, an arsonist, a romance, and more in this very entertaining, well written book.”
To learn more, click here.
