If you've ever read any writing advice online, you know that a lot of people classify writers in a dichotomy: Pantsers and Planners. Planners being those squareheads who make outlines before they write, and Pantsers being the ones who just write, and let their stories grow as they do, finding out where they need to go. They always talk about both of them having their virtues, but there's always this slight undertone of preference depending on which one the author considers themselves to be.

I think they might not be different processes.

I've always been kind of a pantser myself, which is why I was a little surprised when, for Heaven Reaches Out to Us, I decided to make an outline first instead. And, look, maybe this is my obsession with blurring every line and removing every division, but after having been on both sides, I don't really think they are necessarily opposite categories. Outlining might even be more pants than pantsing itself, and it is ultimately what helped me finish this book.

Heaven Reaches Out to Us isn't my first finished book, but it is my first finished long-form story. My previous and first one, Bloodless: A Prologue is a collection of short stories, which are much easier to write from start to end, since they're... short. Heaven Reaches Out to Us is a novella about three kids and the mysterious disappearance of a student from their same school. A completely different kind of book, and a completely different story from what I'm used to telling. My methods for this were very different, but I was determined to finally finish a rather long piece of work, after having only finished relatively tiny ones. And I did it. I found methods that work, and here I am giving them to you in case their magic works for you as well.

It was a really fun experience, and I'll try to show it to you by coming up with a story, and giving it form and shape throughout this post. I won't write a full piece, or anything like that, but you will see a couple ideas and a scene taking form. Here's what I learned.

Planning and pantsing are not that different

It's true! The only real difference between planning and pantsing is that in one you're using fancy words from the start, and in the other one you aren't.

During my outline, I found myself just... going by heart? I just wrote the parts of the story that I knew I wanted to happen from the beginning, and the rest was just writing a bridge between the start and those moments. I didn't even know how I wanted it to end, at first. It all came to me in the process.

But the important difference: Every sentence was quick and dirty, and it was structured like a list. That was, really, what made this an outline instead of a badly formatted book. I was writing a list of things that happened as they came to mind. A scene might look like this:

- Anna was walking home from school, thinking about what had happened there.
- She was so distracted, she bumped into someone.
- She was gonna blame them at first for not moving out of the way.
- But then she saw it was Lara!

Although, depending on how much focus I want to give each event, I might make longer items. Generally, I find that more spread out items means each event gets its own focus, while more dense ones mean that the entire situation just happens in passing. Maybe Anna bumping into someone isn't important to the story, it's just a way to kickstart the next scene. Or maybe it's super important because this is where she learns to not just blame others for her own mistakes.

And I might not really know that. I might not necessarily set out to write the scene with any of that in mind, I'll just discover it as I go, and as I read the scene, and maybe I'll go "oh, this is a fun character development opportunity" or maybe I think "no, this is placing too much value on what is just bumping into somebody." It really is a way to help me find out what these characters and this story really "want" to become.

Word counts hate you and want your story dead

Or maybe it's just me, I don't know.

Let me go on a tangent for a moment: I find that setting a word count goal doesn't help me very much, and I often get so hung up on them that I focus more on spitting words than on crafting story. It's helpful to maximize output, but a #lorem(1000) in Typst will meet that word count goal in an instant. I understand that this might be a moot point to some (well, obviously only words written by you are the ones that count!) but that doesn't change things for me all that much.

And, look, maybe they work fine for you. Wouldn't it be super helpful to have a way to measure how far through your story you are? Word counts don't do that, because you can keep writing and writing forever, and make scenes longer and shorter as you please. How do you know how much is left?

This is where outlines show up again. When you're turning your outline into a book, you can just track how many list points you've done and how many are left, and boom, that's a real progress tracker. A real progress bar that tells you how far you've walked and how long the road is, and that is motivating!

And for motivation, I found it really fun to pair these up with word counts, and write Daily Silksong News-style posts about my progress every day and send them to my friends. Always wanting to write "there has been... yes progress for my writing yesterday" pushed me to write more, and writing the posts themselves was kinda fun. I made sure to write them by hand, instead of using a template or any sort of automation. I'd also rant a little bit about what my progress consisted of, like, "I just finished a chapter!" or "This scene was very important because..."

So, feel free to experiment with alternatives to word counts and word count goals. There are many fun and useful metrics out there. Outlining, especially, unlocks one that I think is the most powerful of them all.

How to write in 7D

One of my problems with writing the book right away is that sometimes I'll think about really important or really cool scenes that happen waaay later, and they'll just be there in my mind, or written in a draft waiting desperately to be pasted into the story. The linear nature of writing just doesn't let you do a lot with those scenes. They can't become part of your book right away, they have to wait until you've written everything that comes up until then.

Even if you do write them, by the time you get to them, you might have changed your mind about how it's written, or maybe the previous scene doesn't lead as cleanly into it. And before I get there, these are the things I'm thinking about already. I try to write the cool scene in such a way that any previous scene can cleanly lean into it, and that's just generally pretty awkward.

But with an outline you're writing only the events. The things that are cool. If things don't lead into it nicely, it kinda doesn't matter, because this isn't the book, this is just the sequence of events. I write the cool scenes way below, after a bunch of newlines, and then when I get there I remove the empty lines.

- Anna was leaving her home.
- This is where the story starts.



- The creature attacks Anna
- It does what seems like sucking the soul out through her face, but mostly it's stealing oxygen from her body, with such force as to turn her inside out.
- Sam uses his knife and stabs it.
- The screaming comes from every direction, but it slowly becomes faint.
- It's dead. Whatever that thing was, it's really dead.
- Anna and Sam are staring at each other, with blood in their hands.
- They nod at each other. They know they won't talk about this to anybody.

This is where the title of this post truly begins to matter. What happens when you have a cool idea for what happens after one of those cool scenes, but haven't got there yet?

You can just add those right away.

You can write your story at multiple points in time.

During the outlining of Heaven Reaches Out to Us, I frequently found myself outlining three different points in the story at the same time, going back and forth between them because of the ways they informed each other. Suddenly, no part of the story had to wait for me to finally get to it. They were already here, and I was writing all of them. I could move the story from whatever point in time I was fixated on, swap the order of scenes without issue, and just generally do whatever. There was no real structure to the writing, even if I was coming up with structure. This is what I meant when I said that outlining might be more pants than pantsing itself.

The outline had to get an editing pass, obviously, but it really wasn't that bad. I just had to make sure that all the pieces added up to a really cool story, and when they did, I could finally get to writing the book.

Though, if you do like structure, you can make list points for your structural elements, and events can be sub-lists. Hell, events can be sub-lists inside other events, if you really need to break them down!

Here's an example you might use if you want to experiment with a three act structure:

- ACT 1: Anna is introduced. She's a school girl. Make sure to focus on the fact that she's irascible, but a little kind. Also introduce her friends, i dunno. Set up the mystery here, make sure to give the reader glimpses of the weird thing that's going on.
  - Events of act 1 go here...
  - Really it's the same as the examples I've given...

- ACT 2: Anna sees the creature for the first time. This is where the _real_ plot starts. Nobody is there to see it. Nobody believes her. She drags Sam into it and it puts both of them in danger.
  - Yeah, you know what to put here.

- ACT 3: They kill the creature. Nobody will hear about it again.
  - They grow apart, but always think about each other.
  - Always thinking about that day.
  - But they've never told anybody.
  - Nobody would believe them.
  - END

Pretty cool, huh?

Now Make A Book

Turning it into a book might still look daunting, especially if your outline looks too long to be achievable, or much shorter than you'd expected. Just write it: The complexity and length of your outline might genuinely not say much about what the final product will be like. Let's take the "cool scene" from earlier as an example. Here's what it looks like as finished prose.

Uh, warning for body horror and violence.

Sam checked his pockets for his knife. He'd brought it in case Anna tried to hurt him. His head was spinning. He didn't think he'd actually have to use it. He wasn't able to tell if he was anxious as he normally was, or if something else was going on.

Something moved amid the bushes. Anna pointed her light at it.

It was there. It stared them right in the eye. It shifted position inside the bushes, but its eye did somehow remain in place. They walked closer. It merely blinked.

There were teeth in its eyes.

It jumped. All that Anna saw was a mess of eyes and teeth and hooves, all together without recognizable shape. It put what felt like lips and like eyelids around her face, and began pulling air out of her lungs. The suction kept getting stronger, more painful, until she felt her lungs and her organs trying to come out through her mouth and her nostrils. It felt like her body was ripping apart. It felt like her very soul was being taken.

Sam gripped his knife tightly. The creature looked with one of its eyes, but it didn't turn around. He lunged toward it, with the weight of his whole body, and pierced through the creature's flesh. It began to scream with Anna's voice. It came from everywhere, and their eardrums threatened to pop.

He twisted the knife, cutting deeper, trying to slice, until he felt it hit something else. Something tender and beating. It was a heart.

He pulled his knife out of its body and then stabbed it with all of his force. The creature's screaming intensified and distorted, until it couldn't possibly get louder. The pain jolted it away from Anna. It seemed dizzy, confused, almost lost. It wasn't able to move.

From there, the screaming began to grow faint. It was unbearably slow, until it eventually was done. The creature wasn't moving anymore.

It was dead. They didn't dare to check.

It was somehow less heavy when it was dead. Anna pushed away the carcass, and got up.

They exchanged looks. Sam's hands were bloody and so was almost all of Anna. Sam wanted to say something. He wanted Anna to say something back. Neither of them knew why. They recognized this, and they nodded.

Nobody will ever know.

See how different it looks? How many new details came up without really affecting the flow of the events? It's so cool! Even at this point, I was still pantsing. I did that through the entire post. I had no plans of ending up with a horror story, really, the creature was just the first cool thing that came to mind during that section about non-linearity, and it grew into this from there. I could turn this into a short story, if I wanted.

I don't, though. Horror stories aren't my thing.

But I hope that seeing this little piece of a story come to fruition through my method helps you see how outlining can be helpful for you, and how it's not completely different from just writing by the seat of your pants. It's just pantsing with style.