One of the things I hear fairly often from pantsers, writer who compose their text directly without a synopsis or outline guiding their writing, is that creating an outline feels to them like something that drains away surprise and spontaneity from their work.

Fair enough for them but I find that even with my extensive outline and synopsis building the pieces still manage to surprise me with revelation along the way.

My current work in process started with just the barest idea of who got killed, who killed them and why. Okay, that’s the essential elements for a murder mystery but hardly enough for me to fully understand the world or the characters so I moved on to extensive notes about the world.

I created these notes to explain to myself how the ship, which would take generations to reach its destination, worked, how the various groupings of people coalesced into stratified cultures and how all that impact the formation of character and motivation. That itself revealed some subtle changes to the original concept that deepen the ‘reality’ of the world.

Next I produced a bullet pointed act break down of the story as experience by my protagonist. I like working with acts not because the structure is king over all but because understanding how structure emerges from story illuminate what I need for this particular tale.

The curious thing and the discovery is that when I started making the bullet points for Act 1 I had a very simple understanding of the antagonists point of view, a very reductive reason for their actions, but when I reached Act 5 and the protagonists and the antagonists clash in a final revelation of truth not only had I discovered a deeper relationship between the two but the antagonist’s motivations had deepened. It because easier to see how they were the heroes of their own story and discovering this at this very early stage will make the prose outline a richer and better document with its own surprised which will repeat with the novel itself.

Somehow, I always have discoveries inside my thoroughly plotted stories, discoveries that would have eluded me had I tried to ‘pants’ my way through it.

This is not to say pantsing is a wrong approach merely that surprise and discovery is part of every process and you need to find the process that works for you.