The Switch: Pantsing to Outlining

If you had asked me six months ago if I were a pantser or an outliner, my answer would have been an emphatic pantser. Now, however, I am starting to change my tune.

Outlining always seemed like it killed the creative process, forcing stories and characters to go where I wanted them to go rather than where they wanted to go. So instead of outlining, I would take the ideas swirling in my head, grab my computer, and start writing. It would be fun and exciting!

Then I would hit a snag and things would start to dwindle, my enthusiasm dying along with the story.

Of the three or four novel length manuscripts I’ve finished, I have not gone back to edit a single one. In fact, most of the time I try to forget about them. At first, I thought it was because the ideas weren’t good enough or I knew I had a better story in mind to work on, so why bother with the old? It turns out that wasn’t it at all.

When pantsing, I would hit a snag in the story and gloss over it, always saying I can fix that when editing. But of course that snag had a larger impact than a single scene, its poison coloring every sentence written after, changing the shape of the story until it was no longer the epic in my mind, but a mess of jumbled letters and punctuation marks. A mess that I no longer wanted to fix, because it was easier to move on.

Then I spent a year writing the first draft of my current work in progress, mostly pantsing it again, and realized that my writing style and my brain type don’t go together. At least not where longer works are concerned. I need structure, a guide that will help me deal with those pesky snags before they poison the rest of the story. And that is where outlining comes into play.

I still haven’t finished a story using an outline, but I’m working on making outlining work for me. I don’t want it to be too specific, giving me the thoughts and emotions of the characters in every scene, but I do want it to guide me through those rough patches, helping me spot them before I’m writing them so that when I do, I know how to handle them.

Each story is a brand new puzzle, bagged and boxed in my brain. It’s my job to put it together correctly. Outlining isn’t the way for everyone, but once I work out the kinks of my personal process, I think it will work beautifully.

I plan to start a series to showcase my my progress with this new journey, so let me know if that’s something you would be interested in reading about and what aspects you are most curious to see.