Posted: October 3, 2024

What if you don't like outlining?

I was sitting at a desktop in the library of my high school. The library was built under the dome of the building, which used to be a seminary. The dome is oval. I remember the Latin engraving way too well — our teacher took us up there in one of the first Latin classes and translated the text. Some people remember the mitochondria. I remember Latin phrases.

I was staring dejectedly at an empty table in Word. We had to write an essay. After researching our topic, we had to make an outline. An outline is a structured list of the topics you’ll write about, often a bullet list. We were taught to plan our writing before drafting. Write one core sentence per paragraph in each row of the table. I thought: how am I supposed to know what I will write before I write the actual thing?

The structure or narrative only really clicks for me when I write. Outlining is tiresome because everything completely changes once I draft the text-–I never stick to an outline. I thought this was normal. Writing is supposed to be hard and annoying; outlining is just something to get over with.

Pantsing

I read an article about editing books a few weeks ago. It used a word I had never heard of: pantsing, also known as intuitive writing. Intuitive writing is when you don’t rely so much on an outline and work much better by simply writing without rigorous planning. Intuitive writers make their text come to life in editing, moving the material around like you would knead a hunk of clay. Outliners do more work upfront, but they need less editing afterwards. Pantsers need to edit more because they didn’t start with an initial structure. I like how the article put it: pantsers like editing more than outlining.

These words hit me like a lightning bolt: that’s me! I’m a pantser!

So here’s what I learned. Some people love outlining. They plan their text from A to Z and then walk the path they carefully mapped. I have two thoughts about this:

WTF? This is absolutely not how my brain works
Ah, writing should be fun, not a struggle. I was just doing it “wrong.”

I’ve internalised that to excel is to suffer. So now you tell me that this isn’t true? Wild. People write in different ways. If you like writing but hate some parts, like outlining, you’re doing it wrong. Don’t resign yourself to hating it: find a way that’s enjoyable for you. For me, that means skipping the outline. But it doesn't mean going in entirely unprepared.

Create order in your head instead of on the page

Say, you’re writing a research paper. You have a mountain of results, ideas, and snippets from papers. It’s a tangled mess in your brain: no structure or entry point. If you start writing now, you will either:

Forget important information;
Misremember important information;
Leave out a few facts because you don’t remember where you wrote it down;
Lose time digging up that paper you want to cite.

Intuitive writers need a system to access all this information. This is the secret I discovered: let go of creating order on the page. Create order in your head instead. Let’s look at an example.

Drafting a review paper

I’m writing a review paper. I read more than a hundred papers and wrote even more notes. I wanted to be smart about drafting: a review paper is not the type of thing you can write entirely by intuition. My process was like this:

Write down a list of categories without looking at the papers
Categorise all your notes into these bins. This process clarifies my thinking and gives me new ideas.
Write down new category ideas, and so on.

I cycled through these steps 2-3 times until I didn’t feel overwhelmed anymore. I organically created an index of all my notes and ideas: the categories I added (in the form of lists and labels). Now, I felt on top of things and had a system to retrieve information.

I used the categorisation I made in this phase as the outline for the first draft. Writing was excruciating. It didn’t feel right: not intuitive. The magic started to happen when all the ideas were on paper. I could finally see the bigger picture and start intuitively rearranging the text.

How to write without outlining

You have to do some housekeeping before intuitively writing complex texts:

Familiarise yourself with the source material (papers and notes) and categorise it for easy access. You still have too much information to see the big picture at this stage.
Draft the text with the only goal of putting all the information in a single file, the equivalent of spreading notes out in front of you on the floor.
Once you have the big picture, leave Planning Central and use your intuition: make a new draft or move around what you already have until you're happy.

This is creative work. There are no rules, especially in the first step. Make categories that help you; it doesn’t have to be logical to other people. Do anything that works: word vomit on paper, drawing on a whiteboard, sticking post-its to a wall, you name it.

Note

Writing can be fun; I promise

I think we forget two things about writing:

It’s a craft
It’s creative

It’s a craft because there are techniques and tricks of the trade to make it easier to get good results. But what we may especially ignore in academics is that the writing process is creative. We write objective, informative texts that aren’t meant to have a lot of personal flair. But to get there, we need to create a logical narrative from murky ideas and unstructured facts. Find a workflow that allows you to do that. So if outlines don't work for you, you're allowed to try something else! Intuitive writing is way more chaotic than outlining and doesn’t fit the academic rigour vibe, but who cares? As long as the content is sound, no one knows or cares how you wrote that paper.

Here’s an idea: skip the outline and try to have a little fun in the next bit you have to write. And send me a picture! I would love to see how you brainstorm complex texts.