Why I Stopped Outlining My Novels + My Pantsing Process

Panting a novel—writing without a fixed outline—has become ShaelinWrites’ preferred method because it produces stronger scene work and better creative momentum, even though she still uses “outline” tools while drafting. After years of outlining, she says her novels began to feel stifled: short stories written by pantsing came out with sharper lines and more satisfying scenes, while novel drafts built from outlines often read as weaker, less aligned, and harder to move forward. The shift matters because her experience challenges a common writing-community assumption that outlining is automatically superior; for her, the real determinant of quality is whether the process keeps her engaged and lets characters and causality evolve on the page.

Her relationship with outlining began in her teens. She pantsed her first four novels, largely because she didn’t know any other approach—she didn’t take notes and relied on memory. Those early drafts were “meandering,” with repetitive or unnecessary material, and she later attributes their looseness to both inexperience and the lack of structure. The turning point came when she joined the online writing community and started preparing for NaNoWriMo. In 2014, she created an outline for her NaNoWriMo novel “Chain Reaction” in just a few days, then drafted the book in 23 days and won. Outlining felt like a productivity cheat code: it reduced uncertainty, prevented writer’s block, and let her keep writing without stopping.

But as she grew older, the benefits of outlining didn’t scale. She began noticing a gap between the energy she felt pantsing short stories and the dissatisfaction she felt during novel sessions. Over time, she described herself as feeling “confined” by plotting—especially when she compared how well she could generate scenes and how objectively strong they felt after drafting. She also started encountering practical problems tied to outlining: stitching events together can fail when later scenes don’t match the planned sequence, and character motivation can drift. Even small changes during drafting can domino into larger plot misalignments, because the outline assumes a character’s motivation will stay stable.

Her current compromise is not “no structure,” but “structure built in real time.” She pants most of the novel while maintaining a lightweight framework: at the start of each chapter she writes a brief overview (including the time window and what the chapter is meant to do), then she drafts scenes based on causality—what must follow what—rather than on arbitrary invention. Some chapters are fully pantsed (like “Chapter 2: Mother Bird,” which she says had almost no detail at the outset), while later chapters gain more detail once the story’s direction becomes clear. She also keeps a scene list that stores scenes out of order, plus a notes document for logline and early planning.

Ultimately, she argues that the “best” method is the one that supports enjoyment and reduces the specific friction a writer faces. For her, the biggest outlining downside is timeline management, so she uses her in-draft outlines to track chronology. She rejects the idea that pantsing is lazy or irresponsible, insisting that careful pantsing can reach similar quality—so long as the writer finds a process that keeps them writing and lets the story click as characters and scenes develop.