Living Without An Outline...

Though I am definitely a solid mix of ADHD and a hyperactive squirrel most days, there are portions of my life that are organized. Like, I think I have every phone number of everyone I’ve ever met since college in my phone. My pens are sorted by color and my closet clothes are arranged by type, longest to shortest from left to right. 

Every writer has a different way of working. For me, writing a manuscript usually starts with structure. I map out the general storyline, then build my characters. After that, I create a 30-chapter template and fill it with bullet points - where characters enter, where the climax lives, where a twist might appear, and whether I need to plant seeds for a future novel. Sometimes I add chapters, sometimes I take them away, but it gives me a starting point. 

It’s organized. Familiar. Comfortable.

But my most recent manuscript, Unwritten, was the first time I broke that pattern. (This photo is when I started Unwritten, right before I decided to go in another direction.)

I still mapped out my characters, and I still had a general sense of the story I wanted to tell - but instead of outlining chapter by chapter, I wrote a few loose paragraphs and jumped straight into chapter one. No safety net. No rigid template.

It was wildly outside my comfort zone.

What surprised me most was the freedom that came with it. Without the outline dictating every move, the characters were allowed to twist and turn in ways I hadn’t anticipated. And they did. By the time I finished the manuscript, I’d used maybe 10% of the original outline I’d started with - but the story was a thousand times better than the version I’d been thinking about so carefully in my mind.

That experience was new for me. It’s been what feels like a thousand years since I was a teenager, so writing a book centered around that age group was already a challenge - but one I genuinely loved.

And somewhere along the way, it hit me: this is kind of like real life, isn’t it?

We live by structure. We plan. We schedule. We plot out our days until everything becomes predictable and safe and, sometimes, mundane. We’re told - over and over again - that there are rules to follow and timelines to meet. School. Work. Sports teams. Relationships.

So what if we didn’t follow the script so closely?

Not abandon planning entirely - that would be chaos, obviously - but what if instead of planning 99% of our lives, we planned 50%? Or even 25%? What if we left space for our days to write themselves?

What if instead of scheduling every outing with friends weeks in advance, we picked up and went on a whim? What if instead of holding back the things we want to say, we said them? What if we stopped staring so hard at a schedule that we missed the quiet pull of something unexpected calling us in a different direction?

Maybe our stories would end up the same way they started. But I doubt it.

Maybe, like Unwritten, they’d surprise us. Maybe they’d take turns we never could’ve planned for. Maybe they’d become richer, messier, and more alive - not because we controlled them better, but because we finally let go a little.

And maybe that’s the point: sometimes the best chapters of our lives aren’t the ones we outline - they’re the ones we allow to unfold.