When you’re ready to write something, whether it’s a blog post, a novel, or something in between, do you start with an outline? Or can you make a writing journey without a map, trusting your ability to get and idea and capture it? Or are you somewhere in between? That’s where I am, in between.

Personally, I’ve just re-discovered a scene I wrote for my second novel, “My Biology Professor’s Murder,” back in July 2021. That was before I bought “How to Write a Mystery,” the handbook from Mystery Writers of America that’s been the subject of my last few posts.

I am setting this novel in summer school for my narrator, so I wanted to write about it in summer. Writing about narrator Daisy MacDonald’s first adventure, which happened in January, was something I could do all year long — until it got to the scenery. For that book, “My Roommate’s Murder,” I’d have been outside in winter weather and soaking up notes.

Bit “My Biology Professor’s Murder” is going to be in summer school, as Daisy tries to make up for the classes she dropped after her roommate died (and she helped the town police with the case). So I needed a hot day to write the opening. Last July, I found it — but I wasn’t sure until I put it away for awhile.

I didn’t get back to the notes until last week. But I re-read the scene, and it’s the new beginning. That puts me firmly in the “never outline” camp, led in the handbook by Lee Child, who also edited the book (with help from Laurie R. King, whose work is more familiar to me).

“Think of the good novels you’ve read,” Child wrote in his “Never Outline! The argument for spontaneity.” He continued, “What was it you like about them? Probably many things. A strong and confident voice, no doubt, telling the tale with aplomb and authority. Through characters who for no obvious reason seem more real than made-up. Whose plight could be yours. Whose end could be yours..”

Child argued that very few of the reasons a story gets remembered (such as the ones above) have anything to do with plot. “Plot is the only element of the three” (character, voice, plot) “capable of being planned,” he wrote.

But the “always outline” camp, described byJeffrey Deaver in the handbook, may appeal to some readers more methodical than I am becoming. I was once the sort of kid who had to have page one just gorgeous before going on to page two — and it took a while.

But I am closer to joining what Deaver and others call the “‘pantsers,’ as in seat-of-the.” I write a scene down when it crosses my mind, so that it doesn’t get out the other ear and escape. (You’d think that with an Imaginary Writers’ Room on duty, ideas would never escape my mind, but you’d be wrong.)

Deaver favors outlining partly because it is efficient; it saves time and energy. Instead of throwing out a long manuscript that isn’t working, “If you outline, look at what happens. You don’t write the first chapter. You stick a Post-it note on your wall, saying ‘Big Exciting Chapter 1.’ Then you step back and start filling in plot points on other Post-its. You’ll realize within two or three weeks that what you’ve been working on isn’t a book worthy of your — and your readers’ — time. You pitch out a dozen Post-its and start on something else.”

There are other writers in the book writing about “hybrid” ways. I like to think of my own version of that as a jigsaw puzzle. When I do a puzzle, I separate pieces with straight edges from the others, then build the frame of the puzzle first. Then I know where various other pieces will go. More about that method, and some of my kindred spirits in it, in later posts.