Why I Sometimes Write Without a Complete Outline

Most writers I know fall into recognisable camps on the outlining question. Some refuse to start a sentence without a chapter breakdown. Others treat any pre-planning as a kind of creative handcuffs. I sit awkwardly between the two, and the longer I write the Thorkild Aske series, the more often I find myself working without a complete outline at all. The result is a process that looks chaotic from the outside but follows its own quiet logic once you understand it.

Readers in Australia have written to me about this habit more than I expected, often after encountering the books through local indie bookshops in Melbourne and Sydney or through editions released by publishers such as Allen & Unwin. The Australian market has its own rhythms, shaped by the country's classification regime and the practical realities of importing translated crime fiction, and that influences how readers engage with slow-burn Nordic noir. Their questions about my method are sharper than most, which is partly why I want to lay out, honestly, how and why I sometimes let a novel find its own shape.

Approach	Strengths	Weaknesses	Best For
Full outline	Clear structure, predictable pace	Can feel mechanical, kills surprise	Series with locked continuity, tight deadlines
Discovery writing	Fresh tension, authentic voice	Risk of dead ends, revision overload	Standalones, character-driven novels
Hybrid method	Balance of planning and surprise	Requires constant recalibration	Long-running series like Thorkild Aske

The Pull of Discovery

When I start a new novel without a plan, the first thing I notice is how much closer the writing feels to the original impulse that made me want to tell the story. The Thorkild Aske books are rooted in grief, loneliness, and the long weather of the Norwegian west coast. None of those things survive a spreadsheet. If I know exactly what happens in chapter twelve, I cannot write the version of Aske who does not yet know what is coming to him, and that version is the one readers respond to.

The Australian readers I meet at festivals often ask whether this is a Nordic thing. It is not. It is more about the kind of novel I want to write. When you plot every twist in advance, the prose flattens. The sentences know too much. Writing without a full outline keeps the prose on its toes, which sounds like a small thing until you read the finished pages and feel the difference.

What Disappears When You Over-Plan

A complete outline tends to fix the emotional shape of the story before the characters have a chance to reveal themselves. I learned this the hard way on an early draft where I had mapped every revelation, including a death I had not yet earned. The outline said the character died in chapter nineteen, so I killed them, and the book never recovered. The reader could feel the machinery underneath.

Discovery writing forces me to keep asking the characters what they want, and sometimes the answer changes the entire shape of the novel. When that happens, I cut scenes I had assumed were essential and follow the new path, even if it means rewriting a hundred pages. It is slower, and it costs me sleep, but the books are better for it.

Pacing and Tension in Pantsed Fiction

Readers sometimes assume that writing without an outline produces loose, baggy novels. The opposite is often true. When you do not know what comes next, every paragraph has to carry its own weight, because there is no safety net of a planned chapter to fall back on. I find myself writing leaner scenes, with fewer explanatory asides, because I do not yet know which details will matter later in the book.

This is also where cross-novel continuity becomes harder. If you want a practical method for keeping timelines and clues straight across a series, I have written about it in a piece on tracking timelines across novels. It is the single biggest logistical problem in discovery writing, and there is no point pretending it solves itself.

Research as a Substitute for Plotting

What replaces the outline, in my case, is research. I read true accounts of cases similar to the one Aske is investigating. I walk streets in Oslo and Bergen. I listen to people who have experienced the kind of loss that drives the novels. None of this is plotting, but all of it shapes the story in ways an outline could not have predicted. A line from a memoir will suggest a motive. A detail from a police report will redirect an entire subplot.

There is a parallel here to the work of people who study emerging patterns in large datasets. A friend who works in exploring data visualisation once told me that the interesting findings are almost never the ones you expected when you started the query. The same is true in fiction. You go looking for one thing and the story hands you another. The outline has to be flexible enough to absorb that, or it has to be absent.

The Checkpoints I Do Keep

Writing without an outline does not mean writing without direction. I keep a small set of fixed points in mind, and I refuse to start a chapter until I know what emotional note it has to land on. Beyond that, anything goes. The checkpoints are usually three or four per act, no more. They function like the buoys a sailor drops in open water, not like a coastline.

I also keep a strict rule about not going back. When I am writing in discovery mode, I do not revise until the first draft is finished. Revising too early is a way of retreating into the outline you never wrote, and it robs the book of its surprises. The first pass has to be brave, and the second pass can be sensible.

When the Outline Wins

There are projects where I do plan everything in advance. A commissioned television script, for instance, needs a beat sheet before a single line of dialogue is approved. A standalone novella with a tight word count cannot afford meandering. And any novel where the ending depends on a specific structural payoff, such as a reveal that has to be seeded twenty chapters earlier, needs a map. For rights inquiries about any of these projects, my contact details are the quickest route.

I used to feel guilty about this inconsistency. Now I see it as a working method rather than a failure of discipline. Some books want to be plotted. Others want to be discovered. The skill is recognising which is which before you are a hundred pages in.

The thing I want readers to take away is that the outline is a tool, not a verdict on whether you are a serious writer. Some of the best novels of the last decade were written almost entirely without one. Others could not exist without rigid planning. If you are a writer, the useful question is not whether you should outline but whether the story you are telling wants one. Listen to it. If you are a reader, the method rarely shows up on the page, and that is exactly the point. When the book works, no one asks whether there was an outline.