Plotters outline and pantsers discover, and the writers who do both get called plantsers, as if everyone has to pick a team.
I’ve published 113+ books under my own name, and I’m not a plotter. I don’t usually outline first. I get an idea, write the first chapter, and then outline. After that I write whatever chapter strikes my fancy and connect them all together. I call it the ink blot method. The outline still matters, though. Every project where I skipped it entirely came out worse than the ones where I did the work.
For more, see Save the Cat! Writes a Novel. The plotter versus pantser debate is less about personality than about what produces finished books.
What Happens When You Write Without an Outline?
You find the story somewhere in the middle of the first draft, then spend three rewrites tearing out everything you wrote before you found it.
Knowing your destination doesn’t make the drive boring.Share on X
When I sit down to write without knowing what happens in the scene, my brain has to figure out what to say and how to say it at the same time.
That’s a recipe for paralysis, especially with ADHD.
My focus fragments. I stare at the screen. I rewrite the same paragraph four times. Three hours later I’ve produced nothing and feel worse than when I started. For more, see how to outline a book and metaphors in writing. An outline eliminates half the cognitive load.
When I know what happens in the chapter, what information the reader needs, and what the emotional trajectory is, I’m executing a plan instead of inventing from nothing. The blank page isn’t blank because I already know what goes on it.
One is a workflow that produces pages and the other is a workflow that produces frustration. For writers with ADHD or executive function challenges, the distinction is the difference between finishing books and abandoning them.
Watch: Planners & Pantsers (Gardener & Architect) | Brandon Sanderson, Brandon Sanderson
What does outlining a novel look like?
Most writers who resist outlining picture a rigid document that locks every scene into place before they write a word. That’s not how I outline. My outlines are skeletons, and I don’t write them until chapter one exists.
For Peacekeeper, my 45-year science fiction series, I built the cosmic structure first: the rules governing the universe, the political systems, the technology, the cultural assumptions of different species. That infrastructure had to exist before characters could move through it consistently. But I discover individual scenes within that structure during writing. I plan the macro structure. I discover the micro execution.
For Grim, my collection of thirty death stories, I planned the cosmic backstory completely before writing any individual story. I needed to know what fragments each story would reveal, how the accumulation would build, where the overall arc was heading. But each individual story was written with creative freedom. Within each death, I discovered how this particular person would experience mortality. The structure held. The discovery happened inside it.
For Shield of Ashes, compressing nuclear escalation into seven days demanded tight structure. The timeline controlled what could have been unmanageable sprawl. Every chapter had to justify its place within a countdown that left no room for wandering.
Each project required a different level of outlining. The principle was the same: know the structure, discover the details.
Why does writing without an outline often mean heavy revision?
Writers who draft without outlines frequently produce manuscripts that require massive structural revision.
They find the story somewhere around chapter fifteen, and they then have to rewrite the first fourteen chapters to set up what they didn’t know was coming. Characters introduced early don’t serve the plot that eventually emerged, and subplots wander because the writer created them in the moment. A writer who loses a year that way pays too much, because the talent was there the whole time and the structure never was.
Stephen King, who famously doesn’t outline, ran into this wall on The Stand. By his own account in his 2000 book On Writing, he was hundreds of pages into the manuscript when the story stalled. He wrote that he’d “run out too many plotlines, and they were in danger of becoming snarled,” and that for weeks he got nowhere.
The fix came to him all at once: a bomb. In the finished novel, Harold Lauder and Nadine Cross plant it at Randall Flagg’s direction, and the blast kills several members of the Free Zone committee, including Nick Andros. King thinned out his own cast to get the plot moving again, and the rest of the book followed within weeks, according to Screen Rant’s account of the episode.
King had the talent to dig himself out, and he still lost weeks. I think a skeleton outline would’ve shown him that snarl long before he was hundreds of pages in, and most writers without his track record would’ve quit and put the manuscript in a drawer.
I see this constantly in coaching. A fiction writer comes to me with a manuscript that’s not working. We analyze it together and the problem is almost always structural. The story doesn’t build. The middle sags. Characters appear and disappear without purpose. These are architecture problems that line editing can’t fix, and they require going back to the foundation.
An outline catches these problems before you write 80,000 words that need to be torn apart. Three hours of outlining can save three months of revision, and that’s plain arithmetic.
A writers’ group asked plotter or pantser recently, and two answers made this point better than I can. One writer pantsed her first novel and spent so long on structural editing that she could have written another whole book. She’s a plotter now. Another pantsed his first three novels, called the revision phase a bear, found Save the Cat Writes a Novel, and became a dedicated plotter. He says revision is much easier.
Most of the other answers were hybrids, and a few sounded a lot like my ink blot method. One writer drafts the scenes she can see most clearly first and calls herself a patchwork pantser. Another writes the opening scene, outlines the book, then writes the beginning, the ending and the middle, in that order. A third pantses scenes and plots afterward to connect the dots. One keeps a list called “Scenes that MUST be written” and checks them off as she goes.
And one self-described ADHD plotter outlined a seven-book series, then decided his heroine needed a backstory. Then her mother’s story. Then the generations before that. His original series is now generation six.
Outlines grow too.
Does outlining kill spontaneity?
The standard defense of pantsing is that outlining kills spontaneity. If you know what happens, the writing feels mechanical. The joy of discovery disappears.
I think that argument has done more damage to new novelists than almost any other piece of craft advice I know. It gives people permission to skip the one step that would have gotten them to the end of the book.
I’ve written 113+ books. The joy of discovery has never disappeared, because discovery happens at the sentence level. Knowing that chapter twelve involves a confrontation between two characters doesn’t tell me what they’ll say, how the tension will build, what unexpected details will emerge in the writing, or what the scene will feel like on the page. The outline provides direction. The writing provides surprise. Think of it like driving. Knowing your destination doesn’t make the drive boring. It means you’re not wandering randomly and ending up somewhere you didn’t want to be. The writers who find outlining stifling are usually outlining wrong. They’re writing detailed scene-by-scene scripts that leave nothing to discover. That’s over-outlining, and it’s as counterproductive as no outline at all. The useful outline sits between those extremes: enough structure to prevent wandering, enough openness to allow discovery.
How Do You Build an Outline That Works?
Start with what you know, and if you work the way I do, write the first chapter before you try. What’s the central conflict? What does the protagonist want? What’s preventing them from getting it? What’s the emotional arc from beginning to end? These four questions give you the spine.
From there, identify the major turning points. What event launches the story? What changes the protagonist’s understanding or situation at the midpoint? What forces the final confrontation? What’s the resolution?
You don’t need to know every scene. You need to know the structural pillars. Fill in between the pillars with enough detail to know what each chapter accomplishes. Not what happens in every paragraph. What the chapter does for the reader’s experience. What information it delivers. What emotional shift it produces. What question it answers or raises. My Plot Handbook covers three-act structure, character-driven conflict, stakes, and twists in depth. The Story Arc Handbook covers opening hooks, rising action, midpoint crisis, and climax. The Novel Handbook addresses novel-length architecture, including saggy middles, character drift, and series planning.
The opposite trap is planning forever. A neurodivergent writer in a fiction group asked recently how to stop working out every scene in her head until it all clicks, because it was slowing her down. She’d also noticed that once she put ideas into words, new ones showed up on their own. It’s why I write the first chapter before I outline. Writing is how I find out what the story is. The outline catches the structure. You don’t need every scene to click before you start, and waiting for perfect is just another way of not writing. Aim to finish. Polish in revision.
What This Means for Your Project
If you’ve been writing without outlines and finishing books consistently, your process works, so don’t change it.
If you’ve been writing without outlines and have a trail of unfinished manuscripts, the outline is probably the missing piece. Your talent and discipline are fine. Your brain is trying to decide what happens and how to say it at once, and neither gets done well.
If you’re starting a new project and don’t know whether to outline, try it. Write chapter one, then spend three hours building the skeleton before you write anything else. If the writing goes faster and the story holds together better, you have your answer. What I don’t want is for anybody to keep a half-finished manuscript in a drawer out of loyalty to a label. Plotter and pantser are team names, and your book doesn’t care which team you joined. It only cares whether you finish it. For one-on-one help building a structure that works for your specific project, book coaching is designed for exactly this. For the full collection of craft handbooks, visit The Writing King. To discuss a ghostwriting project, start with a conversation.
Plotter vs. Pantser FAQ
Writing It Yourself? Keep Going.
If you want a professional in your corner while you write, my book coaching works one on one without taking the pen out of your hand. The Novel Handbook takes this topic deeper.
