Story outlines and I do not get along. I don’t know that I’ve ever written a legitimate story outline (sorry grad school professors; those outlines you got from me were done after I wrote the story). I don’t really know why the idea has never appealed to me; in the rest of my life I’m almost obsessively organized, with lists and spreadsheets and my schedule planned out every day, sometimes to the minute. Maybe my creativity is where all my rebellion is housed.

My writing-without-an-outline style is called “pantsing,” as in “flying by the seat of your pants,” and I’m not alone! In a 2013 piece for Writer’s Digest, “6 Secrets of Writing a Novel without an Outline,” author Steven James declares that outlining has never been his thing, either, and provides some ways of looking at the construction of a novel that invite writing without a roadmap, so to speak.

The constraints of outlining

“Rather than straightjacketing your story by forcing it into three acts, or trying to map it out as ‘character-driven’ or ‘plot-driven,’ take the organic approach by first simply asking yourself what is truly at the heart of your story.”

We all learned about the three-act story structure in school, but if you really think about it, as a writer you’re not merely writing a beginning, middle, and end (and the specific things that are supposed to happen within those acts). Rather, the progression of your main character is a lot more complex than that, and the outline might lock you in to a narrowness of thinking that keeps you from diving more deeply into things like setbacks, motivations, character growth, and the overall organic progression of your story. In short, having an outline might make you think you have to follow it.

Leaving the beaten path

“Without serendipitous discoveries, your story runs the risk of feeling artificial and prepackaged. Give yourself the freedom to explore the terrain of your story.”

For me, once I have a plan I tend to want to stick with it. It’s taken a lot of internal trial and error to find the level of flexibility needed to actually make it through my days without a stress migraine when things inevitably go haywire, but with something like a story, where I’m in complete control of the world? The less I have written down, the better, lest I lose the ability to see the interesting and unexpected paths my characters could go down because I’m so focused on the goals I wrote for myself before I ever set fingers to keyboard.

Kill your darlings…or at least let them off the hook

“When people outline, they’ll inevitably come up with ideas for scenes that seem important to the plot, but in the resulting manuscript, the transitions between these scenes (in terms of the character’s motivation to move to another place or take a specific action) are often weak.”

Have you ever written a scene that becomes your baby instantly? Your storytelling is on point, everything has gone according to the mental plan you have, it’s an absolute masterpiece…that you realize 50 pages later is utterly superfluous.

Oof.

I may mourn the loss of a beloved scene (and likely paste it into another document for potential recycling in a different story), but if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. If my story is weaker overall for it, it has to go. And you know what? That’s okay, because I wasn’t following an outline anyway, so my story went where it needed to go organically.

I know outlining has its pluses, but none of the benefits have ever worked for me. I much prefer to sit down at my computer, vague idea or single scene or even just a character name in hand, and see what happens.

Are you on Team Pantser or Team Planner?