Are You a Plotter vs. Pantser?
The whole “Plotter vs. Pantser” thing?
It’s a bit tiring.
Not because it’s wrong—but because it’s oversimplified. If you’ve been writing or teaching storytelling for a while, you already know you don’t fall neatly into either camp.
You might outline like a lunatic and still discover your best scenes by accident. Or maybe you free-write your way through chaos, only to find yourself instinctively following a three-act shape anyway.
This post isn’t about picking a side. It’s about understanding what each approach offers you—on a structural level, an emotional level, and even a creative one.
Whether you’re building a 10-episode streaming series or sculpting a one-act play, the real power comes from knowing which techniques drive the story best for that specific project.
So in the next sections, I’ll break down what’s actually happening under the hood when you plot… or when you don’t.
What Plotters Know That Pantsers Often Discover Too Late
If you’re someone who outlines—meticulously, obsessively, beautifully—you already know the power that structure brings. Plotting isn’t just a control mechanism. For many expert storytellers, it’s a design principle. It lets you shape reader or viewer emotion with surgical precision.
Let’s look at what makes plotting genuinely powerful—and why, when done right, it doesn’t kill creativity, it supercharges it.
Plotting Creates Narrative Gravity
When I outline, I’m not just writing down what happens. I’m designing tension arcs, thematic echoes, and character reversals. A good plot framework pulls the audience forward, like gravity. Take Breaking Bad. Every season is clearly mapped—Walter White’s transformation is no accident. Vince Gilligan famously said he wanted to turn “Mr. Chips into Scarface.” That’s a structural journey with emotional resonance built in.
The beauty here is that plotting lets you engineer inevitability. The audience feels like things are unfolding naturally, but behind the scenes, it’s all crafted. Every choice, every setback, builds toward a defined narrative apex.
You Can Control Time—and Rhythm
Plotters are time architects. You’re not just figuring out what happens—you’re deciding when it happens, and that’s huge. Story lives in rhythm. Consider Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. That mid-book twist? You don’t stumble on that by accident. It lands exactly where it needs to because Flynn is working with a tightly structured dual-POV timeline.
Think about how Dan Harmon’s Story Circle breaks the act structure down into 8 key emotional beats. That’s a plotter’s dream—it’s modular, but it lets you track character transformation with precision.
Rhythm isn’t about speed—it’s about pacing change. Whether you’re using Save the Cat, Seven-Point Structure, or something you invented in a spreadsheet at 2 a.m., the point is: a structured narrative lets you modulate energy with intent.
You Can Plant & Pay Off Like a Magician
Plotting lets you set traps—for your audience and your characters. Foreshadowing, callbacks, ironic reversals… These techniques don’t land as powerfully when you’re pantsing.
Why?
Because without planning, the payoff often has to be discovered in revision. That’s fine—but it’s a lot of work to backfill.
A plotter can design a moment in Act I that only blooms emotionally in Act III. One of the cleanest examples is in The Sixth Sense. When you rewatch it, every line, every glance, supports the twist. You can pants that kind of cohesion, but M. Night Shyamalan plotted it with purpose.
Plotting helps you build stories with long-range emotional resonance. It’s not just about beats—it’s about layering meaning across scenes.
The Risk? Over-Control.
Here’s the caveat: plotting can kill surprise—not just for the reader, but for the writer too. I’ve absolutely had moments where I stuck so hard to an outline that I missed better paths the characters were nudging me toward. Plotting is a tool—but it can become a cage.
Ever read a novel that hits every beat perfectly, but you don’t feel a damn thing? That’s the shadow side of over-planning. The characters are puppets, not people. The story works, technically—but lacks soul.
But When It Works… It’s Fire
The key takeaway: plotting isn’t about control—it’s about designing space for control and chaos to co-exist. Expert plotters don’t just write what happens. They write why it happens, when it happens, and how the audience will feel when it does.
What Pantsers Get That Plotters Sometimes Forget
Let’s get something straight: pantsing isn’t “winging it.” At the expert level, pantsing is a skill, not an accident. It’s a mindset—and one that values discovery, emotional intuition, and trust in the subconscious to surface something that structure can’t always catch.
In other words: advanced pantsers aren’t lost. They’re exploring with purpose.
So let’s talk about what happens when you write without a map—and why some of the most emotionally resonant, character-driven stories come from writers who let the story lead.
1. Characters Aren’t on Leashes
One of the most liberating things about pantsing is that you let characters act before defining their entire arc. You don’t predetermine their change—you observe it as it happens. And that lets you find moments that feel real, not just functional.
Toni Morrison, for instance, said she often didn’t know where her stories were going, but she knew the characters. That trust in emotional logic, rather than structural logic, creates moments that breathe. Pantsers let characters be inconsistent, contradictory, impulsive—like actual people.
And because you’re not steering the ship from the outline, the surprises feel authentic, not engineered.
2. Emotional Turns Drive the Scene
Plotters often think in terms of scene goals. Pantsers think in terms of emotional energy. What’s the turn? What’s the shift in feeling? If you’ve ever written a scene not knowing where it would go—and suddenly it cracked open into something raw or unexpected—you know what I’m talking about.
I’ve seen writers pants their way into better reversals than any outline could produce because they weren’t forcing the scene toward a purpose—they were letting the emotion escalate until something snapped.
For example, in Normal People, Sally Rooney captures the emotional messiness of her characters not through big plotted twists, but through emotionally charged interactions that don’t resolve cleanly. You feel like you’re living it with them. That’s pantsing at its best.
3. You Discover Theme Rather Than Declare It
When you outline, you’re often tempted to build the story around a theme—revenge, forgiveness, identity, whatever. But pantsing lets the theme emerge from what actually happens, not what you planned.
Let’s take The Road by Cormac McCarthy. It’s stark, minimal, and feels deeply intentional—but it was reportedly written in longhand, without much planning. That bleak, tender, terrifying meditation on fatherhood? It wasn’t imposed. It grew from what the characters endured.
That organic development gives the story weight. When the theme arises naturally, it doesn’t feel preachy—it feels inevitable.
4. First Drafts Aren’t Final Drafts
Here’s something every great pantser knows: revision is where the structure happens. Discovery writing is often messy, sprawling, and nonlinear. That’s okay. It’s not about getting it “right”—it’s about getting it true. And once you have that raw material, you can sculpt it into shape.
In fact, I’d argue that advanced pantsers often have a stronger revision game than plotters. Why? Because they’ve already fallen in love with the characters and the emotional flow—they’re just tightening it, not finding it.
George R.R. Martin once said he’s a “gardener, not an architect”—he plants seeds and watches them grow. Yes, his work is sometimes chaotic (Winds of Winter, anyone?), but the emotional terrain?
You feel that it came from somewhere visceral, not formulaic.
5. You’re Writing to Find Out What the Story Wants to Be
That’s the heart of it. Pantsing respects the unknown. It says, “I don’t need to know where this is going to know it’s worth writing.” That’s terrifying for a lot of writers. But for experienced storytellers, it can also be exhilarating.
There’s a reason writers like Margaret Atwood, Haruki Murakami, and Neil Gaiman often pants their way through drafts. They’re chasing something—an idea, a voice, a shape—and they trust their storytelling instincts to carry them through.
And when it works, it’s not just a story. It’s a revelation.
The Hybrid Mindset i.e. When Structure and Discovery Play Nice
If you’re anything like me—and most experienced writers I know—you don’t just plot or pants. You do both. Or you toggle between them. Or you build weird hybrids that no writing book could explain. That’s not confusion—it’s craft evolution.
Let’s talk about this middle ground. Because once you’ve tried both sides, the real power comes from blending them.
Start with a Skeleton, Then Let It Morph
A lot of hybrid writers start with just enough structure to feel safe. Maybe it’s a rough act breakdown. Maybe it’s five major turning points. You build a story skeleton, then give yourself permission to improvise inside it.
I’ve done this for screenplays where I plot the major beats—inciting incident, midpoint, dark night—but leave entire acts fluid. That way, I’ve got narrative guardrails, but I’m not locked into a scene-by-scene grid.
This approach works beautifully for genre fiction, especially mystery and thrillers, where structure matters a lot, but you still want space for twists and character deviations.
Emotional Outlining Instead of Plot Outlining
Here’s a trick I swear by: instead of outlining events, I outline emotional beats.
- “This is the scene where she loses faith.”
- “This is when he finally forgives himself—but can’t say it out loud.”
- “This is when everything should be fine, but it doesn’t feel that way.”
This lets me follow a story arc emotionally, not mechanically. The events can change. The feelings don’t. That’s a great way to stay pantsy without losing story drive.
Reverse Engineering From a Discovery Draft
One of the most common hybrid methods? Write a messy discovery draft first, then reverse-engineer the structure in revision.
You’ve probably done this.
You get 60,000 words in, then step back and go: “Okay… what actually happened?”
Then you build a retroactive outline, restructure, rethread arcs, and add proper turning points. You’re not throwing away the draft—you’re distilling it.
Think of it like documentary editing: you didn’t script it, but now you’re shaping it into something with rhythm and meaning.
Timeboxing Creativity
Here’s a trick for people who love the thrill of pantsing but need deadlines: timebox your spontaneity.
Give yourself 30 minutes to draft a scene cold. No outline, no notes. Just raw exploration. Then stop. Zoom out. Ask yourself what the scene’s doing for the story.
This is great for hitting flow without losing control of the overall arc. It’s a way to treat scenes like jazz improvisation—within a defined key.
Use Modular Story Design
Some advanced writers are using modular beats—like LEGO bricks. You map out 5 or 6 emotional or plot “modules” that can be rearranged as needed.
Let’s say you know you’ll have:
- A betrayal
- A confession
- A false victory
- A breakdown
- A final reckoning
That’s not a linear outline. That’s a menu of story energy. You can reorder, rewrite, or remix them depending on how your characters evolve. It’s plotting without rigidity—and it’s damn effective.
Before You Leave…
Forget “Plotter” or “Pantser.” That’s marketing language. The truth is: you’re a craftsperson. And every story you tell might need a different approach.
Sometimes the story demands a blueprint. Other times, it needs you to stumble through the dark until something catches fire. If you’ve been doing this a while, you already know that the real magic happens when you stay flexible, curious, and honest about what the story needs—not what method you identify with.
So take the tools from both sides. Use them like a pro. And most importantly—keep making things that surprise you.