The question came in on Instagram, the one that gets asked in every writing space online for the last ten years: should writers outline everything, or let stories evolve naturally. And it’s so embedded in writing culture by now that most people answering it just pick a camp and start defending it, plotter or pantser, outliner or discovery writer, and all of those framings are answering a question that comes too early in the process to be useful.
The question worth answering first is which method matches the brain you happen to have been given, and most of us are bad at knowing the answer to that, because we mistake the trappings of one method for the substance of it.
For years I thought I was a plotter, because I’m a tidy person with tidy files and color-coded Notion pages and a sorted drafts folder, and I assumed all of that visible organization meant my writing process worked the same way. It didn’t. Tidiness and plotting are different skills that happen to look similar from the outside, and I had spent a long time confusing them.
When I sit down to actually write a scene, I don’t structure it in advance, and I don’t write down what’s going to happen or break the chapter into a sequence of beats I then fill in. What I do is I have an idea, sometimes a one-line summary so I remember what the scene is for, the chapter title usually helps me feel the shape of it, and then I write and find out the rest as I go. If I try to plan beyond that, if I sit down with notecards or a beat sheet, the scene dies before I get to it, because the act of explaining it to myself in advance pulls all the energy out of writing it.
That’s a discovery method, but not the romantic version where someone opens a blank document and waits for the muse, because I know the world and the characters and usually the emotional shape of the chapter going in. I just don’t know the line-by-line, and I don’t want to know it in advance, because I want the writing itself to be the discovery. That’s how my brain produces work I’m proud of, and once I figured that out I stopped trying to force myself into systems that belonged to other people’s brains.
This is the part I actually want to land, because it’s the part most writing advice skips. Before the outline question, there’s a question about how your brain produces ideas in the first place, and you have to answer that one honestly before any method advice can help you. On a day when you sit down and write something good, what was the actual runway that got you there, was it a plan you executed, or was it an image you couldn’t shake until it had pulled an entire scene behind it. Whatever was true on the days that worked, that’s the thing to build a method around.
For some writers the honest answer is a detailed outline, because their brains need scaffolding to climb and the structure is the trellis their creativity grows on, and if that’s you, don’t apologize for it and don’t let pantser-romanticism convince you you’re doing it wrong. For other writers the structure is a cage, too much planning costs them the charge of the scene before they ever get to write it, and if that’s you, the answer is to plan less, because more discipline is already what’s hurting you.
The reason I’m phrasing it this way and not as “find your method,” which is how most writing advice ends, is because “find your method” makes it sound like the method is sitting out there waiting to be discovered, and it isn’t. The method is downstream of the brain. You watch how your brain actually produces work, the method falls out of the observation, and there’s no other way to do it that doesn’t end with you fighting your own neurology.
And the observation takes time. I was wrong about myself for years. I thought I was a plotter because my files were neat, and the actual evidence of how I write was sitting there the whole time telling me otherwise, in journals full of detailed plans for novels I never wrote, and in drafts that only came alive once I’d abandoned the outline and let myself find the chapters on the page.
You might think you know which kind of writer you are, and it’s worth checking that against the evidence, because the version of yourself you present to other people and the version that shows up when you’re actually writing aren’t always the same one, mine weren’t, and the work got better when I stopped trying to make them match and started writing for the one that actually does the work.
That’s the whole thing, really. Watch yourself write, honestly, and write accordingly.
