Hot take: I stopped outlining my stories and got better results

I spent 6 months planning every chapter of a novel I was working on, had 40 pages of notes and character sheets, then when I sat down to write it just felt dead on the page. So I tried the opposite for a short story last week, just wrote a single line premise and let it fly, and it ended up being the most natural thing I've ever written. Has anyone else found that too much prep actually kills the creative spark for them?

2 comments

2 Comments

milestaylor1mo ago

Yeah totally, that part about the planning making it feel "dead on the page" hit me hard... I did the same thing with a fantasy novel, had maps and family trees and a whole magic system worked out, but when I actually started writing the first chapter it was like trying to breathe underwater. It's weird how having all the answers upfront just sucks the life out of the words... Now I mostly start with a scene or a character voice and just follow it around until I hit a dead end. The stuff I write on the fly always has more energy, even if it means I have to delete half of it later.

rose_cooper1mo ago

That's a lot of drama for some first chapter problems, @milestaylor. You're acting like you discovered a new religion because you can't write a fantasy novel with too many notes. People have been writing novels for centuries with maps and family trees and it worked fine for them. Maybe the issue isn't the planning, maybe it's that you're trying to force a whole world into a first chapter. Try just writing one scene without the pressure of the whole magic system hanging over it. It's not that deep.

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