There are two kinds of writers in the world. The first is what we call plotters. These are the people who outline every part of a book down to the smallest possible detail ahead of time. They know the whole plot, all the character sketches, the world, and everything else about the story before the writer ever writes the first sentence.
The second kind of writer is what we call a pantser. This term comes from the phrase, “flying by the seat of your pants.” These are the people who sit down in front of a blank page and just start flowing.
The pantsers usually get to the end of the first draft of a book, go back through the manuscript detail by detail, and fix everything after the fact to make it look like they did it that way on purpose.
In this way, the pantser treats his first draft as the outline. He’ll go back, fix any inconsistencies or plot errors, clarify things, and either rewrite, add, or take things out of the book that should have been included or never should have been included in the first place.
The plot may have deviated wildly from the writer’s original idea. They may not even have had an original idea about the direction the story was going to go. They may have started with a vague picture of a certain character, place, scene, or concept and started writing from that alone. These people let the story develop organically.
As I’ve mentioned elsewhere on my platform, I fall into the plotter camp. I used to be a pantser. Now I outline everything. I’ll outline an entire ten-book series before I ever write the first sentence of the very first book.
There have even been times when I’ve had an entire character sketched out, including their backstory, personality, and narrative arch, and even some of the more critical conversations they’ll have in Book 10 of the series. I’ll clarify all of that before I ever start writing Chapter 1 of Book 1.
I do this because I’m a lot more likely to hit a wall, get stuck, and not know where to go or what to write next if I don’t plan to the series ahead of time.
There is no domain of life where it’s better to go in completely unprepared or even partially prepared. You would never dream of going on a trek into the wilderness, or into a boardroom to give a presentation, or into a job interview without being prepared.
And yet that’s exactly what most people think they’re going to do when they sit down in front of a blank page, either on paper or electronically, and start flowing. It never works out that way.
This is why so many writers get partway through their book, get stuck, and never finish it. This is why the tiny fraction of writers who do actually finish their book put it away in a drawer, never look at it again, and let it eat away at the back of their minds for the next three decades before they decide to do anything with it—if they ever decide to do anything with it.
The successful writer doesn’t do this. If you’re staring at the wall wondering what happens next in the story, you should be doing this in the outline stage of developing your plot. If you don’t know what happens next in the outline stage, you won’t know what happens in the writing stage.
This is one of the reasons why I’m able to write so much and actually finish my series so effectively. I plan them in advance.
Needless to say, pantsing a book makes the editing process take far longer. This is how we wind up with authors like George RR Martin cutting scenes out of the book, adding the same scene back in, cutting it out, and adding it back in again multiple times because he can’t decide if the scene belongs in the book or not.
This is how we wind up decades after he should have finished the book and he probably still can’t tell us how the story is supposed to end. Forget about the rest of the series.
Don't be that person.
Ernest Hemingway famously advised writers to stop writing each day in the middle of a paragraph, scene, or even in the middle of a sentence. He deliberately left his current thought unfinished so that, when he came back to work the following morning, he would always know what to write next.
His second piece of advice was, if you don’t know what to write, just write something—anything. It doesn’t matter what it is. It can be nonsense. It can be your grocery list. It can be a description of the environment in which your current scene takes place. Just start writing something even if you don’t plan to include it in your book. Just get the words flowing.
Writer’s block is one of the many excuses writers use to NOT do the work. The list of excuses is myriad. Writers will do absolutely anything to stop themselves from actually sitting down and doing the work.
If you do sit down and commit to doing the work, you’ll quickly realize that you know exactly what to write—or you would if you outlined your story. Staring at the blank page is not the time to try to figure out what happens next in your story.
Sure, there have been plenty of times when I’ve deviated from the outline. In fact, I almost always do—at least in part. There have been plenty of books I’ve written that became something completely different from what I planned for them to be. In the military they say a plan never survives contact with the enemy
The difference between me and just about every other writer out there is that I actually did plan for my books to be something. I planned out how they would start, how they would progress, and how they would end.
Most of my series do follow the outline at least in the broad plot strokes. The differences are mostly stylistic in how the characters react to the events that unfold—not the events themselves. Most of my books don’t deviate in their endings because I almost always plan for my books to mean something. What the story means is one of the main things I plan ahead of time.
The story ending is the last, most crucial impression you’re going to leave on your reader. This is where you’re going to bring your story to its finale and pay the reader off with the satisfying conclusion they’ve come to expect after reading your whole book.
You won’t be able to do that if you don’t plan the ending in advance. This is the mistake modern TV shows make and why so many long-running TV series have terrible endings. No one planned the ending in advance. The writers planned to continue the series for as long as possible—for decades or maybe even forever. The writers aren’t able to tie up any loose story threads or plan out any big setups and payoffs that will end the series in a satisfying way.
If you want your story to mean something or if you want to leave your reader with a thought-provoking message, you have to embed that message in the entire narrative and nail the ending decisively. It has to be obvious to your reader that you really did do it that way on purpose and you didn’t just pull some proverbial rabbit out of your ass and say, “I meant to do that,” when you actually didn’t. Your reader isn’t stupid enough to fall for that.
Effortless flow is a byproduct of mastery and preparation. You wouldn’t expect to just pick up a musical instrument and start flowing on it—not in a way that would make it sound good and something a sane person would want to listen to.
Flow and effortless improvisation in music is a byproduct of mastery and countless hours of rote practice. What makes you think you can just sit down in front of a blank piece of paper and come out with something decent just because you know how to read and write? Art doesn’t work that way.
Failure to plan is planning to fail. The more you plan your story in advance, the more effortlessly it will flow when the time comes to do the hard work of actually writing the book.
If you don’t plan, you can expect to wind up staring at the page, the wall, or out the window thinking of anything other than what happens next in the story. Every hour you put into creating a complete outline equates to countless hours of slog and headache you’ll save downstream. Consider it an investment—not just in your own sanity but in the quality of your finished book.
If you are staring the blank page and telling yourself that you have writer’s block, what you actually have is an effectiveness problem. You’ve failed to plan accordingly for one of the most mentally demanding jobs on the planet. Just showing up and flying by the seat of your pants is the most amateur way to go about writing a book. The results will probably be amateur at best.
The other possibility if you’re sitting there staring at a blank page is that you just don’t have the willpower to get the work done. You’re making a bunch of excuses and “writer’s block” is one of them.
You’re telling yourself you need to take a walk around the block while you think about what you’re going to write next. You’re telling yourself you need to organize your desk or clear your hard drive or answer your emails or straighten out this particularly complicated scene you don’t know how to create.
None of those excuses is true. You just need to sit down and start writing. You either have outlined and planned the scene—in which case you already know what happens next—or you haven’t planned the scene. You’ve decided to entrust the quality of your book to the whims of Fate—so that’s going to work out about as well as can be expected.
I can promise you one thing. Staring at the screen, taking a walk around the block, cleaning your house, and thinking about things is not going to make writing the book any easier. Writing the book an hour from now or a day from now or a week from now or a year from now will not be any easier than it is right now.
In fact, delaying will make it even harder. You won’t be able to think of the scene a month from now any better than you can think of it right now.
Most people think that creative ideas for a novel plot just come to a writer like a bolt from the blue. This is very rarely the case. If an idea does come from the blue, it’s usually so nebulous and such a minuscule part of the total plot that it doesn’t really get the writer any closer to outlining the story.
The vast majority of the work that goes into outlining a book—either in the outline stage or in the first-draft stage—the writer has to consciously, deliberately, and laboriously make up the story. They have to create it on purpose the way a potter fashions an object out of clay.
This is the real meaning of creativity. Creativity is an active, deliberate, grueling process that takes effort, commitment, and focus. It doesn’t just happen to you automatically.
If you’re waiting for ideas to come to you out of the clear blue sky, you’re going to be waiting a long, long time—possibly forever. This is what will happen when you get halfway through your book and don’t have the first clue where the story should go next. This is what will happen either in the outline stage or the first draft stage.
So you might as well make it a hell of a lot easier on yourself—and do your book a massive favor—by outlining everything ahead of time. The job of writing the book will be easier and you’ll stand a much better chance of coming out the other end with something you can be proud of. I speak from experience on this. Heaven knows I’ve written enough books to prove that it’s true.
I hope this helped someone. God bless you all.
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