When I Stopped Pantsing (and My Drafts Got Faster)
There was a week one autumn when my desk smelled like pencil shavings and cold tea. Rain ticked against the window, a metronome I tried to match with the keys while my plot wandered the neighborhood like a lost dog. I had fifty pages of beautiful lines and no idea where the story needed to go next. Every new scene felt like improvising on a stage with the lights off.
I used to call it freedom. Pantsing—discovery writing—felt romantic, honest, alive. We chase the spark, right? We follow voices, toss characters into a room, and see what they do.
I loved that adrenaline so much I ignored the knot in my stomach that arrived at the muddle in the middle. Maybe you know that knot. You open the document and your chest is tight. You pick at sentences and convince yourself today’s win can be a gorgeous paragraph instead of a scene that actually moves.
The book becomes a long hallway with doors that lead to more hallways. You tell yourself, “It will reveal itself.” And sometimes it does—just not in time to keep the draft from stalling.
There’s nothing wrong with discovery. The wrong part, for me, was asking discovery to carry all the weight. I wanted the magic without the scaffolding that lets magic climb.
Why Discovery Writing Stalled
When I wrote purely by feel, the beginning crackled. The first chapters arrive in a gust: character voice, a mood, a sentence that tastes like a cinnamon toothpick. Then, after the first big turn, I’d hit a bend and see fog.
I’d toss a shocking backstory at the page or add a clever side character, and it worked for two scenes. Then the fog thickened. It wasn’t laziness; it was load. Every page I didn’t plan became a new puzzle my brain had to build and solve in real time.
Decisions piled up: What does she want in this room? What does the antagonist do off-page? How does this clue matter? Without a simple north star, each decision cost more than it had to. The drafting slowed, not because I lacked discipline, but because I lacked direction.
Does this sound familiar? You write an intense confrontation, then realize three chapters later your protagonist is suddenly polite again because you forgot the wound you just carved. Or you drop a clue in chapter two and forget it exists. I told myself, “I’m not disciplined enough.” The truth was kinder. I was asking memory to do a job a tiny plan could do better.
The middle is where even the most poetic discovery can stall us. Why? We drift from cause-and-effect to episode-and-episode. Scenes become interesting moments instead of linked dominoes. Without a throughline—one sentence that says who wants what and what stands in the way—we have to refind the story every morning.
Some of us also carry a complicated feeling about the word outline. It smells like school. It can feel like betrayal: of surprise, of voice, of play. I said for years, “I don’t outline. I can’t.” That sentence kept me in the fog longer than I needed to be.
It took one small change to learn I could still discover while giving tomorrow a hook to hang its coat on. Here’s the quiet punchline of this section: the stall wasn’t a talent problem. It was an aim problem. My words didn’t need a cage—they needed a target.
A Lightweight Outline
I didn’t turn into a spreadsheet. No color-coded binders. What I built was a napkin-sized outline I could hold in one hand.
Think of it as a compass, not a train schedule. It won’t tell you how to feel in chapter nine. It does whisper, “If we head west, we’ll hit the coast.” That was enough to make the day’s writing feel less like a scavenger hunt and more like a hike with a sunrise at the end.
The first time I tried it, I was at a café with a sticky table and a barista who drew hearts on to-go cups. I opened my notebook and wrote: “Nora wants to win back her sister. The promotion gets in the way. She chooses family, but on her terms.” Three lines. The next scene unknotted like thread.
Lightweight doesn’t mean vague. It means you choose a few anchors that everything else can clip to:
- Want: what your protagonist wants on page one, in concrete terms.
- Obstacle: the person, force, or belief pushing back.
- Change: the way the protagonist will be different at the end.
That tiny trio caught so many problems that used to slow me down. If a scene didn’t push Want against Obstacle, it was a pretty vignette, not part of the spine. I could still write pretty vignettes—just not in the draft that needed to move.
“Isn’t that too simple?” I wondered. On the page, it wasn’t. The simplicity freed me to layer texture without getting lost. I could still chase a surprising line of dialogue, still let my villain have a hobby making tiny boats. But the core stayed visible. When I veered off, those anchors tugged me back with a gentle, “Does this get us closer?”
You might prefer naming turning points—those big moments where direction shifts. “She leaves,” “He tells the truth,” “They burn the letters.” Use words you’d text yourself. If a turning point reads like a memo, I’m less likely to feel it. I’d write: “They almost kiss, don’t, and decide to pretend it never happened. Lies.”
Another day, my outline became a scene ladder in the margins: Scene A causes B, which causes C. Not every rung was labeled. That was the joy. I gave myself steps I could hop between and blank spaces to fill with discovery. I started each session by checking the rung above and below the one I’d tackle. It made the day’s work smaller. When a day is smaller, we’re quicker and kinder to ourselves.
The outline lived, too. As I learned my characters better, I let the Change line evolve. If I discovered a deeper wound that made the final choice richer, I updated the note. The Want sometimes sharpened: “Win back her sister” became “Be believed by her sister.” See how that one word swap makes scenes easier to aim?
What mattered most was this: I didn’t treat the outline as law. I treated it as a promise. “I will try to get us to a moment where this change feels true.” Promises are freeing, not binding. They focus the work. They leave room for a miracle.
By the way, nothing about this hand map blocked delight. We still get to feel that rush when an image arrives from nowhere and sings. The outline just makes sure the song moves the story, too. It’s a scaffold you can hang garlands on.
A small takeaway before we move on: keep it light and human-sized. Your outline is there to reduce friction, not to impress anyone. If it fits on an index card, your future self will thank you.
Measuring Draft Velocity
Once I had a compass, something curious happened: my sessions got quicker. Not frantic—quicker like a river that finally found its bed. I stopped circling scenes, writing three beginnings and a half-hearted end.
I’d sit down, check my anchors, and glide into the moment that mattered. I also started paying gentle attention to how easily the day’s words landed. “Velocity” sounds clinical; I mean something softer: is today a meander or a sprint? Is this scene a sludge or a slipstream? Notice, not judge.
The notes I kept were tiny. A date, a rough start time, what scene I was on, and the number of words or pages at the end. Sometimes I jotted one sentence about how it felt: “Foggy start, clear after coffee,” or “Should have walked first.” No charts. No guilt. Just footprints.
Why track at all? To see patterns that feeling hides. I thought I wrote best at night. The notes told me my happiest scenes happened mid-morning, after a ten-minute walk. I assumed long sessions meant long progress. The notes showed I did my best work in ninety-minute chunks, and anything past two hours became carpet-fiber arranging—fussy and slow.
You don’t have to count words if counting makes you itchy. Try scenes per session. Try minutes spent in motion (fingers moving, not staring). Try “beats” per day—little turns that click into place. I had one week where I measured “doors opened.” Did I move the story across a threshold? The days felt satisfying even when the word count looked modest.
The outline helped here, too. Because I knew the next few rungs, I didn’t spend twenty minutes reminding myself what the scene was for. If my protagonist needed to admit she broke the rule, I could feel the room tighten. That specificity made the writing quicker and truer.
I didn’t have to double back and rewrite the spine as often. My draft didn’t just speed up; it smoothed out. On the slow days, I asked, “Did one anchor go fuzzy?” Often the Want had turned into a vibe: “She longs for something more.” That’s not a want. That’s weather. When I made it concrete again—“She wants to get her name off the bad-debt list”—the words picked up.
I noticed the biggest improvement in the time it took to make a scene do its job. Before, I might grind an afternoon revising the same exchange because I couldn’t tell what it was about beyond “beautiful hurt.” With a lightweight outline, I could tell. “This is where she decides to lie.” Suddenly the shape of the beats was obvious: tell, pushback, tell bigger, consequence. The dialogue had bones.
If you like a number, here’s a human one: my first-pass pace used to hover around a slow 400 words an hour on a good day. After three weeks with the card in my notebook, I was closer to 900–1200 when I drafted a scene I’d anchored. Not always. But often enough that I stopped dreading the chair. The peace was worth more than the pace.
Measuring also softened my self-talk. On a foggy Tuesday, old me would sigh, “You’re behind.” With a few weeks of notes, new me could say, “Tuesdays lag. That’s okay. You sprint Wednesdays.” It turned writing from a moral test into a rhythm. Rhythm gives grace.
Another gift: by noticing how fast the draft moved, I learned where revision would matter most. Scenes I’d labeled “sludge” were almost always places where the Obstacle was muddy. In revision, I could aim straight at the resistance. That made editing faster too, because I wasn’t sanding every sentence. I was reinforcing the floor that carries the furniture.
You might wonder, “Does this steal joy?” For me, it gave joy back. Counting a little helped me see that the slow days weren’t failures; they were part of the river. Measuring didn’t make me perform. It let me decide with care: should I push another thirty minutes, or would a walk reset the current?
A simple takeaway to pocket: when you can see the next two stones in the stream, you hop quicker. And if you glance back to see how far you’ve come, the crossing feels kinder.
—
When I stopped pantsing as a philosophy and kept discovery as a practice within a light frame, my drafts didn’t become mechanical. They became merciful. I still chase lines that taste like lightning. I’m just doing it with a compass in my pocket and a sense of how fast my feet move on certain terrain.
If you love the thrill of not knowing, keep it. You don’t have to trade your wildness for a rigid plan. You can give yourself a single page, a trio of anchors, a promise about how a person will change. You can notice—gently—what kind of day your writing is having. Those two soft structures can take weight off shoulders you didn’t realize you were carrying.
We’re not machines. We’re people telling stories that ask us to hold many threads at once. A lightweight outline holds a few for us. Light tracking helps us meet ourselves where we are. Together, they turn the desk back into a place where rain on the window is company, not a countdown.
Here’s to drafts that flow because you can see the shore—and to revisiting the shoreline as often as you need. If you feel curious, jot three lines for your current work in progress: the Want, the Obstacle, the Change. Slip the card under your keyboard and see what tomorrow’s session feels like.
Related reading in Craft & Editing
The Outline I Actually Stuck To · The First Review That Changed My Writing · Make Every Line Pull Its Weight