To Outline, or Not to Outline?

I don't know about you, but I have always been a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants kind of person. When I first started writing, I just wrote. No plan in my mind. Just writing. I was that way for quite a while. In a short period of time, I wrote three first drafts of novels like that. The problem was, out of those three, only one seemed salvageable. The characters were wooden. The plot was deeply flawed. The writing itself wasn't that great -- or at least I didn't think it was.

I was determined to find the problem, if it was even a problem to begin with. Why was my production only sub-par? Well, NOW I know that it was simply my inexperience that caused the problem. But at the time I thought that the issue was that I never outlined. I'd heard about other authors outlining and doing character development before they even started writing.

Well, that's the problem! I need to outline first and develop my characters, then the first draft will end up being better!

Made sense to me. So, I started trying to outline before I even began writing. The moment inspiration struck, I dove into the character development. It was super fun! The characters were awesome! The plot was thrilling and flawless! (This is what was going through my mind. It probably wasn't true.) Then I finally came to the actual writing. I got about forty pages in and quit. It was dull. Boring. I already knew everything that was going to happen. Outlining took away the thrill of the discovery draft. I tried outlining another book before writing it and the same thing happened! All my inspiration was spent on getting ready to write, not the writing itself!

Stephen King makes the same point in his book, "On Writing". Outlining (and this only applies to some people) takes the joy out of the writing itself.

I had been going through a long dry spell where I just couldn't write, didn't know what to write, didn't want to start something else that I didn't think I would finish. But I finally came to this conclusion. And to test it, I started writing again without outlining. In a week, I wrote seventy pages! For me, outlining is a killer. The reason I really started in the first place was because I knew that other famous authors did it. So why not?

This may not apply to some of you. I know that outlining does work for others. But in my case, it stifles the creativity and discovery of the first draft.

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