Tried all the Absolutely 100% Guaranteed To Work writing advice, and still struggling to make it work? P.S.C. Willis shares how they chose chaos instead.

The majority of writing advice online comes from people with ‘a method’—their ten easy steps that work every time! Except when they don’t. There are thousands of us whose brains don’t function that way. So, how can you bring order out of chaos? Is being a hot mess with too many tabs open something you can get better at?

My answer is yes, and I’d like to share what has worked for me, and how to embrace your chaos rather than fighting it.

Existing Advice

A particular type of advice rises to the top most often: The promise that writing is a crackable code is much more marketable than the ‘I sort of scream into the void until it starts making sense’ approach. Don’t get me wrong, I’m very grateful for those hyper-organised individuals with plot cheat sheets and a side hustle in telling me how to use them. The amount of free, high quality writing advice out there has helped me grow, and it’s a beautiful thing. But the default being one type of person always causes problems.

The following are some rare islands I’ve found in the sea of intimidatingly overstructured advice.

Plotter/Pantser/Planster

Spend any time in the writing community, and you’ll come across the terms ‘plotter’ (someone who makes detailed outlines up front) versus ‘pantser’ (someone who dives straight in). I fall in the murky middle. I am the hybrid known as the plantser: I crave structure but am bad at creating it.

Knowing the terms is its own tip. Searching ‘advice for pansters’ does lead to specific resources. Beware that some of it strays into ‘just become a plotter’ and you’re only ever two clicks away from someone trying to give you a template.

The best and most specific advice I ever found came from Ellen Brock. Instead of ‘plansters,’ she uses the term ‘methodological pantser,’ with the idea that as well as the plotter-panster axis we have methodological (using tools and structures) versus intuitive (figuring out by doing). Her four-part series of tailored advice for each type was the first time I saw someone tell me I didn’t have to reshape myself to be an effective writer. 

(Photo by Bookblock on Unsplash)

Zero draft

This term has been incredibly liberating for me. In a nutshell, it’s blasting your way through, however badly. It is the ‘[insert name here]’ and ‘after that they defuse the reactor somehow’ version of your book that you could never show to anyone. It straddles the void between detailed outline and actual draft, and can stand in for the former. 

Reverse outlining

Either during or after blahing out a messy zero or first draft, you summarise what you’ve written in an outline, to help with further writing or editing. Some things come into my head as vivid scenes, and some as plot points, so my outline tends to build from multiple directions and (sort of) meet in the middle (with gaps and contradictions).

Mechanics not manuals

For me, effective advice gives insight into how writing works, whether that’s via topics like flashbacks, or methodology like value shifts. Sometimes, it’s due to focusing on the micro rather than the macro, but not always—small scale advice can still be prescriptive and big picture advice can be inspiring. It works because it’s stripping the engine down to show me its parts rather than trying to tell me how to build it.

Chaos in practice

So, what does this actually look like? Most of us with a chaotic writing style are reluctant to explain our working, either because there doesn’t seem to be a method to share, or because of internalised shame at not being perfect plotters. But I’d like to invite you in, because even if my way doesn’t work for you, knowing it exists can be helpful. And because this wouldn’t be a real writing article if there wasn’t a handy five-step method that you too can try!

Step One: Just start. Anywhere you want to.

Most of my stories come into my head as a character or basic premise—a ‘wouldn’t it be fun if…’ Usually, a key moment will play out in my head. I jump straight into those moments and start writing the scene, regardless of whether I know anyone’s name yet. I scribble snippets—the bits of dialogue, the lines that will be soul crushing once they have context. 

Ideas breed other ideas; once I’m in a world more parts of it start coming. This is a mix of everything—writing scenes leads me to jot down character notes or holes in the worldbuilding. 

Blank pages are my best friends. If you present me with a template, I guarantee it will be the wrong length. It will either be so short that I don’t see the point of filling it out, or so long that I know I’m never going to bother. And those empty boxes will bother me. I was a good student, I turned in all my homework (even if I fought my mum over being made to do it, and as a teen did it in my free periods right before the class) and I got good grades. I do not want a bad grade in filling out a character profile.

Seeing as it’s not a homework assignment, the easiest way to achieve that is to not do one.

The blahing doesn’t just happen in front of a computer. I ramble into my voice notes while walking in the park, I jot a hundred words in the notes app on my commute, I keep marker pens by the bath to write on the tiles. Let no idea escape. 

(Photo by Arash on Unsplash)

Step Two: Sort it

At some point, I stop and sort into sections. This might happen once the document gets unwieldy, or when my brain stops spitting out ideas but I still want to be rewarded with Productivity Dopamine.

By now, I do have the classics, like characters, setting etc. But also solid chunks of actual writing, and ‘plot points (brainstorm)’ and ‘plot points (probably definite).’   

I start to jigsaw my pieces into place, while jumping all over the place to add to them. If someone is smashing up their phone in one scene and using it in another, there’s an obvious sense of which came first. There’s always a section at the end called ‘Miscellaneous’ for one-liners, smush and things I can’t place—yet.

It’s hard to define the point at which this shades from a brainstorm into a zero draft. Sometimes it gets its own clean blank document, sometimes it just evolves from the ooze. My folder for one project contains file titles such as:

• Random braindump/scribblings
• Neat(ish?) Outline(ish?)
• Is this a real draft, is this just fantasy?

Step Three: Get stuck

At some point, every book gets hard. That’s okay. The biggest liberation for me has been deciding that those tough moments aren’t caused by my failure to plan. Or, if they are, planning is not a way of escaping that feeling—it just makes it come earlier in the process.

I prefer being stuck during the fun bits than stuck in something that’s preventing me from getting to them, or which means they’ll probably lose their punch by the time I do. It’s a lot easier to push through the sticky spots of your manuscript when there isn’t a little voice in the back of your head telling you they never would have happened if you’d been better at outlining.

Step Four: Get unstuck

Sometimes it’s time to go for a walk and be that strange person making the faces my characters make and muttering into my phone. Sometimes, I have to sit my squirrely little butt down with a Pomodoro timer and face the hard bits.

This is one point where I dip into craft advice. I’ve heard this referred to as “refilling the well”—going back to the things that stir your imagination. That might be books or TV shows, but for me, it’s often writing podcasts. I love hearing people talk about their process, whether it’s right for me or not. At this point, writing advice isn’t a stifling “must-do” list but a series of potential springboards that might launch me back into my project, or at least a comforting reassurance that everyone gets stuck sometimes.

Final thoughts

This advice can and should be taken out of order, or with steps overlapping or revisited. One of the biggest things I had to unlearn was the idea of a linear process. It’s always presented as Brainstorm > Plot > Write. Time and time again, I’d get stuck on “plot.” I’d be able to squish some of my ideas into a 9-step plot dot or a hero’s return arc, but I’d have gaps or questions. And I’d look for a new option, the one that was going to make enough sense that I could fit into it.

Never finding it made me conclude I was bad at outlining. Which possibly meant I was bad at brainstorming—after all, I never got a working plan from it. Jumping straight into writing meant I’d skipped over both, so they weren’t for me.

It seems simple, but no one ever told me I was allowed to go back a step without it meaning I’d failed.

Now, my workflow is more like a dialogue. I have an idea, jump into writing, think of a plot point, outline a bit, attach a couple of lines of dialogue, get stuck, go back to brainstorming. I play with craft advice, and even where it’s presented as ‘before you start’ there’s nothing stopping me using it afterwards, as a diagnostic tool to figure out why what I’ve written isn’t working. 

And I’ve never been happier. I have books that I am 13k and 28k into that have been crafted this way. It’s how I wrote this article.

Instead of searching for the magic outline that will fix your messy brain, let it run wild, and find the story and the beauty in the things it gives you.

(Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash)