How I Finally Figured Out My Plotting Process

(And Why "Pantsing" Was Slowly Killing Me)

Let me paint you a picture.

It's a quiet Tuesday. Work is light. I have the whole morning ahead of me. I open my document, stare at chapter two for forty-five minutes, close the document, and spend the next hour reorganizing my desk instead.

Sound familiar?

Here's what I thought my problem was: I needed more time. More quiet. More inspiration. More of whatever magical ingredient everyone else seemed to have that I clearly did not.

Here's what my problem actually was: I had no idea where my story was going.

Not in a vague, hand-wavy kind of way. I mean I genuinely could not tell you what was supposed to happen in the next scene, why my character would care about it, or what any of it had to do with the story I was actually trying to tell. I had vibes. I had aesthetic. I had an absolutely stunning playlist. What I did not have was a plot.

And here's the thing about vibes: you cannot write 90,000 words on vibes alone. (Believe me. I tried.)

So What Is Plotting, Really?

I used to think plotting was for people who didn't trust their instincts. The whole "pantsing vs. plotting" debate made me feel like choosing to outline meant I was somehow less of a real writer — like I was cheating, or like I'd suck all the spontaneity out of the story before I even started.

What I've learned is that plotting isn't the opposite of creativity. It's the container that holds it.

Think of it this way. You wouldn't build a house without a blueprint. You might make changes along the way — maybe that wall moves, maybe a window goes somewhere unexpected — but you're not pouring the foundation and just hoping rooms show up. Your story is the same. The outline is your blueprint. You can absolutely deviate from it.

The point is that you have something to deviate FROM.

My Actual Process (Messy Edition)

Here's how I plot a story, and I'm going to be very honest with you: it is not clean. It is not linear. My Shower Muse is doing about forty percent of the heavy lifting.

Step One: The Messy Brain Dump

Before I touch a single outline template or story structure book, I spend time just dumping everything I know about the story onto paper. Characters, setting, scenes I'm excited about, random lines of dialogue that popped into my head at 2am, all of it. No order. No judgment. Just getting it out of my head and onto something that isn't my brain, because my brain has a terrible filing system and loses things constantly.

This is not your outline. This is the raw material you're going to build your outline from.

Step Two: Figure Out What Your Story Is ABOUT

Not the plot. The story. What is it actually about?

For me, this is always about character. Specifically: what does my character want, what do they need, and why are those two things at war with each other? Because that tension — between want and need — is the engine that drives everything else. Without it, you have a sequence of events. With it, you have a story.

I'll be honest, this step took me the longest to figure out. I'd be halfway through a chapter wondering why it felt flat, and the answer was always the same: I didn't know what my character actually needed from the scene. Not just what they were doing. What they needed. What was at stake for them emotionally.

Once I figured that out? The scenes wrote themselves. (Mostly. Let's not get carried away.)

Step Three: The Chapter Outline

Once I know what my story is about and roughly what has to happen, I outline chapter by chapter. Not in exhaustive detail — I don't write a novel inside my outline — but enough that I know:

• What happens in this chapter

• What the emotional state of the POV character is going into it

• What changes by the end of it

That last one is key. Something has to change. The character, the situation, the reader's understanding of something. If I can't answer what changes, I don't have a chapter. I have a placeholder.

Step Four: World-building AS You Go

Here's something I used to get wrong: I thought I had to build the entire world before I started writing. I thought I needed to know every law, every piece of history, every cultural detail — all of it, upfront, before a single chapter could be drafted.

Nope. That way lies madness and a folder full of documents nobody will ever read.

What actually works is building the world in layers, and only giving the reader what they need to understand what's happening RIGHT NOW. Three lines. That's the rule I follow now. Three lines of worldbuilding, maximum, before I get back to the story. You can always go back and deepen the details. You cannot get back the reader's attention once you've lost it to an info dump.

Step Five: Write It Badly

This is probably the most important thing I'm going to say in this entire post, so I'm going to say it clearly:

Your first draft is not supposed to be good.

It is supposed to exist.

The number of times I've stalled out on a scene because I wanted it to be perfect before I moved on — I couldn't tell you. But I can tell you that every single time, it was the wrong call. You can't edit a blank page. You can always fix bad words. You cannot fix words that were never written.

Give yourself permission to write the messy version. Write the version where the dialogue is clunky and the description is thin and you've typed "something happens here" in brackets three times. That version is valuable. That version is the raw material your actual story is hiding inside.

The Plotting Tools I Actually Use

I keep my chapter outlines and story notes in StoryWright, which has been genuinely life-changing for someone like me who used to have notes scattered across approximately eleven different platforms and could never find anything. Having everything in one place — characters, worldbuilding, timeline, all of it — means my brain isn't working overtime trying to remember where I wrote that thing about the dome and the whale.

My Messy Notebook handles the overflow. The middle-of-the-night ideas, the "what if we changed this entirely" spirals, the scenes that show up uninvited while I'm in the shower. (Hi, Shower Muse. You're chaotic and I love you.)

And my planner? My planner just holds my appointments and looks pretty. We've been over this.

The tl;dr

Plotting isn't the enemy of creativity. It's the reason your creativity has somewhere to land.

Figure out what your story is actually about. Know what changes in every chapter. Build the world in layers, not all at once. And for the love of all things holy, let yourself write a bad first draft.

Your story doesn't need to be perfect. It needs to exist first.

Got questions about your own plotting process? Drop them in the comments. I'm happy to help.