Whether you’re writing an article or blog post, a memo to your client or your file, a brief or a demand letter, outlining before you write is almost always recommended. 

It helps you include all the key points, put them in an effective order, and save time with the actual writing because you’ve thought about what to say before you say it. 

Outlining is your friend. Especially for longer or complicated pieces that contain a lot of information. 

But sometimes, outlining slows down the process of getting words on paper, and leads to a less interesting, more formulaic piece of writing. That’s okay for most of the writing lawyers do. We don’t need to be creative; we need to relate what happened (or will happen), what we think and recommend, and convey our thoughts succinctly. 

And that’s usually what we do. 

But if you’ve ever struggled to construct an outline, found yourself repeatedly re-organizing and re-writing it instead of getting on with the writing, as have I, you might want to try something many fiction writers do. 

It’s called “Pantsing” and means “writing by the seat of your pants,” that is, writing (a story) without deciding what to write in advance. 

No outline. Or much of one. 

Pantsers start with a general idea of what they want to happen in their story, and usually not much more. They know what their main characters are like, what they want and how they might get that, but often only a few paragraphs which serve as a place to start. 

They write and see where the story takes them. They let the story surprise them as much as they hope it will surprise their readers. 

Pantsers say their writing is fresher this way, because they “hear” the story as they write it. They say it’s more enjoyable to write this way, unconstrained by the rigidity of a detailed outline. 

Authors who write this way say they love the freedom and spontaneity this gives them. Authors who are committed outliners say that writing without an outline, without a net as someone put it, scares the heck out of them and they couldn’t do it. 

What about non-fiction? Could lawyers write with little more than a general idea and a few points to cover? 

I do this all the time with short pieces. What you’re reading now is an example. 

I didn’t plan to write about pantsing today and yet here we are. This is where the writing led me.

Writing by the seat of your pants is liberating. I have no plans to make pantsing my primary modus operandi, however. Outlining will continue to be my jam. 

On the other hand, for my current work-in-progress, a full length non-fiction book, I’ve completed a lot of the outline, but I’m experimenting with pantsing some chapters and parts thereof. After all, a chapter is really a collection of short essays. 

I don’t know how successful I’ll be, but I’m confident it will help me finish the first draft.