Why I stopped outlining and started 'discovery drafting' instead

I outlined for a decade because I was taught that pantsing — writing by the seat of your pants — was for amateurs. Then I noticed my outlined books all had the same flaw: the middle sagged, exactly where the outline stopped telling me anything I did not already know.

Discovery drafting is not the absence of planning. It is planning one layer down: I know the ending, I know the next two scenes, and that is the whole map. Everything past that gets discovered at the desk, the same way the reader will discover it.

The scenes that survive editing are, almost without exception, the ones I did not fully know the shape of before I wrote them. The outlined scenes read like homework. The discovered ones read like something happening.

I still keep index cards. I just stopped pretending they were a contract instead of a compass. The map only needs to show the next two turns — you find out what the destination actually looks like when you arrive, not before.