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Shoutout to the writer's group who made me stop overplanning
I used to spend weeks outlining every chapter before writing a single word, but last Tuesday at the Brews and Prose meetup in Portland, a guy read a rough first draft that was messy as hell but still hooked everyone. He said he just writes the scenes that excite him first and fills in the gaps later, and it clicked that my outlines were just excuses to avoid actually typing. Has anyone else found that ditching the outline made your story feel more alive?
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blairc901mo ago
Did you ever catch yourself rewriting the SAME outline over and over? I did that for months. I had this whole binder full of character bios, timeline charts, even a map of a city I never used. Then one night I wrote the climax scene first, just for FUN, no plan at all. That scene ended up being the whole reason I finished the book. The outline was like a security blanket, but the real story only started when I let it get messy. It felt like I was finally writing a story instead of planning to write one someday.
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reese_hayes711mo ago
Work is the same way, sometimes you gotta jump in blind to find the real problem.
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ivan7741mo ago
Funnily enough, that's pretty close to how I learned to cook - spent weeks planning the perfect chili recipe and measuring everything, then just threw random stuff in the pot one night and it came out way better lol. Sometimes the mess is where the magic actually lives.
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