Outlines Don't Kill Creativity—They Make Unlocking It Efficient

There’s a common fear floating around writing advice spaces that outlines are sterile. Mechanical. That the moment you introduce structure, creativity packs up its things and quietly leaves the room. The unspoken assumption is that creativity is fragile—that it needs to be protected from planning, or it will somehow evaporate.

I don’t buy that.

My experience has been the opposite. Design phases don’t kill creativity. They make it move faster. They reduce wasted effort, which means you get more chances to try ideas, throw bad ones away, and refine the good ones. In practice, that leads to more creativity, not less.

This isn’t about telling anyone how they should write. It’s about how I’ve seen ideas actually get better—both in writing and in software engineering—when iteration is cheap, fast, and intentional.

So strap in for a meaty post. I'm trying to be smart today.

The Myth: Creativity Happens in One Perfect Burst

There’s a romantic idea that great stories arrive fully formed. A lightning strike. A sudden vision. One perfect, inspired pass where the writer simply transcribes brilliance onto the page and calls it a day.

It’s a comforting myth. It makes creativity feel magical. It also makes the rest of us feel like we’re doing something wrong when the first version of an idea is…bad.

That belief sticks around because we rarely see the process. We see the finished book. The final cut. Drafting hides iteration, and revision happens quietly, offstage, where no one can see how many wrong turns came before the right one.

But creativity doesn’t actually work that way. Good ideas aren’t born finished. They’re refined. They’re tested, broken, reshaped, and tested again. The first version is usually just a rough signal that something might be there.

Real creativity is iterative. It’s the accumulation of small improvements over time, not the product of a single inspired moment. The writers who seem effortlessly brilliant aren’t skipping that process—they’re just practiced enough that their iterations happen faster and more deliberately.

The myth isn’t that creativity comes in bursts. It’s that the first burst is supposed to be the last one.

Creativity Is Iterative and Disciplined

Early in my career, I worked as a firmware engineer at a large electronics company. There was a section of the codebase that everyone knew was a problem. It was old, brittle, and written for a world that no longer existed. It worked, technically, but only in the sense that it hadn’t caught fire yet.

I wanted to refactor it. Not just to clean it up, but to make it resilient—to give us room to innovate elsewhere without constantly tripping over this fragile chunk of legacy code. Management wasn’t interested. Refactoring cost time and money, and from their perspective, this thing “just worked.”

Eventually, I managed to get buy-in—but only for a very small part of it. One narrow slice. I was frustrated and more than a little bitter about it. It felt pointless.

A senior engineer named Bob noticed and pulled me aside. Bob was one of those rare people who was both deeply competent and quietly kind. He listened to my rant, nodded once, and said a single sentence:

“Innovation is iterative.”

That was it.

It took a moment for it to sink in, but he was right. Even that small change mattered. It was a foothold. Today one improvement. Tomorrow another. Over time, those iterations add up. You don’t fix the whole system in one heroic pass—you make it incrementally better until the original problem no longer exists.

That lesson rewired how I think about creativity.

Innovation doesn’t arrive as a single lightning bolt. It comes from repetition and discipline. Every strong idea has ancestors—earlier versions, worse versions, failed attempts that taught you what didn’t work. Ideas don’t emerge fully formed; they’re refined through contact with reality.

This is where outlining enters the picture. Not as a form of control, but as a way to make iteration cheaper. In terms of mathematical probability, if a given idea has a random chance of being bad, good, or great, then the fastest path to great ideas is to move through more of them. Outlines and diagrams let you clear bad ideas early, refine promising ones quickly, and cycle through possibilities without paying the high cost of rewriting finished prose every time.

The faster you can iterate, the faster creativity improves.

Why Outlining Makes Iteration Faster

Prose is expensive to change.

It’s dense. Interconnected. Fragile. Touch one part and you risk breaking three others you forgot were attached. Anyone who’s spent time inside a long manuscript (or code, for that matter) knows this feeling—the quiet dread that comes with realizing a change near the beginning might ripple through everything that follows.

This is where my background in software development colors how I think about writing. In engineering, the cost of fixing a problem grows exponentially the later you find it. Catching an issue during design is cheap. Catching it during testing is painful. Catching it after release is a nightmare. Writing works the same way. Elegant prose isn’t fundamentally different from elegant code in a lot of ways. And in the end, they both build a human-crafted system where late changes are costly.

Outlines and diagrams, on the other hand, are cheap.

They’re made of card-sized ideas. Single sentences. Boxes and arrows that can be moved around without consequence. You can swap beats, test reveals, reorder events, or kill bad ideas outright without mourning the loss of five thousand carefully tuned words.

The difference is stark. Digging through chapters to restructure a story feels like demolition. Changing one box in a diagram feels like thinking.

This is also where the idea that outlines are restrictive gets things backward. At this stage, you’re more free, not less. You’re not worrying about how hard something will be to rewrite or how much work you’re throwing away. You’re just exploring the shape of the story.

Once prose exists, everything changes. Now you’re in manager mode. Every new idea comes with a cost-benefit analysis: how long will this take to fix, and what might it break? The manuscript “works,” in the same way old software works, and suddenly innovation feels risky.

Outlining keeps you out of that mindset longer. It lets you think freely, iterate quickly, and commit later—when the foundation is strong enough to support it.

You’re Still Writing the Story (Just Not in Prose)

Two of the most common objections to outlining go something like this: “I need to write it to see it,” or “I can’t fix the story until it exists.” As if the only work that counts is the kind that looks like paragraphs on a page.

I don’t think that’s true.

If you’ve outlined a story from beginning to end, you have written it—just in a different medium. Each pass through an outline is a full narrative pass. You’re making decisions about cause and effect. About setup and payoff. About what happens, when it happens, and why it matters. Those are the bones of the story, whether they’re expressed in prose or not.

By the time you start writing scenes, the story has usually already been "written" several times. You’ve walked it through in your head. You’ve tested versions of it in summaries, bullet points, and diagrams. In other creative fields, we already accept this as writing. Comedians talk about “writing” a joke even though it's never put on paper. Musicians “write” songs and perform them, even if nothing is formally notated until internet guitar nerds write tabs for it after the fact.

Writing, in that sense, isn’t about the format. It’s about creation.

Seen this way, outlining stops looking like preparation and starts looking like drafting. You’re not delaying the work—you’re doing it in a form that makes iteration faster and failure cheaper. When prose finally enters the picture, it isn’t the beginning of the story. It’s the latest expression of one that’s already been written, revised, and understood.

Separating Engineering from Art (Without Killing Either)

One way to think about this is to separate two different kinds of work that often get tangled together: engineering and art.

Story structure is engineering. It’s about systems. Cause and effect. Load-bearing moments. Pacing. Setup and payoff. Prose, on the other hand, is art. It’s voice, texture, rhythm, and emotional color. Both matter. They just don’t benefit from being done at the same time.

When you mix them too early, you slow both down. You’re trying to solve structural problems while also worrying about sentence-level beauty. Every change becomes heavier than it needs to be, because it affects everything at once.

Outlining lets you engineer the story deliberately before you decorate it. You can tune pacing without rewriting dialogue. You can adjust reveals without worrying about how pretty the paragraph sounds. You can focus entirely on whether the story works—whether the emotional beats land where they should and whether the structure supports the impact you’re aiming for.

Once that foundation is solid, prose becomes something else entirely. Now it’s execution. Expression. Texture. You’re no longer asking, “What happens here?” You’re asking, “How does this feel?” That shift matters to me, because it lets me bring my full creative attention to the page instead of splitting it across competing concerns.

This separation doesn’t remove creativity. It concentrates it. By giving structure and prose their own space, I can let each one be as strong as it can be—without one constantly getting in the other’s way.

Impact Is Designed, Not Discovered by Accident

Big moments only land if they’re supported. Twists, fights, and reveals don’t work in isolation—they require setup, space, and timing. Without those things, even a good idea can feel flat. With them, an otherwise ordinary moment can hit far harder than expected.

This is where outlining really earns its keep. It lets you iterate on impact, not just events. You’re not asking, “Does this happen?” You’re asking, “Does this land?”—and you can ask that question before you’ve written ten thousand words around it.

I saw this very clearly while working on The Templars of Alderath. Early on, the ending was straightforward. The protagonists entered the final conflict for a simple reason: survival. Save themselves. Save their parents. It worked. It made sense. It just wasn’t next level.

As I iterated on the story through diagrams and outlines, something interesting happened. The relationships between characters started to stand out more clearly—especially across different POVs and plot threads. Because I was looking at the entire story at once, patterns emerged. Emotional throughlines I hadn’t consciously planned began to surface.

That’s when I realized there was a much richer ending available.

By altering the final motivation to lean into those relationships, the conflict gained weight. The payoff wasn’t just about survival anymore—it was about choice, consequence, and everything that had been quietly built along the way. Crucially, I could see why it would work, because the setup was already there in the design. The ending didn’t come out of nowhere; it was hiding in plain sight, waiting to be uncovered.

Without those earlier iterations, I’m not sure I would have seen that ending until the book was finished. And by then, weaving in the necessary setup—across multiple POVs and storylines—would have been time-consuming and fragile.

Could a Gunslinger have discovered the same thing? Sure. But in my case, the insight came from seeing several narrative threads at once, after two to three weeks of focused planning. I suspect reaching the same realization through full prose drafts would have taken longer.

Outlining didn’t limit surprise. It created the conditions for a better one.

The Real Risk Isn’t Outlining

The real danger isn’t outlining. It’s getting stuck.

Every approach has a failure mode, and for outlining, it’s the endless planning loop. There’s always one more edge case to consider, one more beat to refine, one more diagram to clean up. At some point, preparation stops serving the story and starts protecting you from committing to it.

That’s when outlining turns into a refuge instead of a tool.

The boundary matters. Outlining exists to make iteration faster, not infinite. The goal isn’t to account for every possible detail before you write—it’s to move quickly through bad ideas, refine good ones, and reach a version of the story that’s solid enough to execute.

At some point, you have to pull the ripcord.

You commit. You stop reshaping the map and start walking the terrain. That transition doesn’t mean creativity ends. It just changes form. Instead of iterating on structure, you iterate on voice, texture, and emotional nuance.

Creativity still breathes here—just with fewer rewrites. You’re no longer constantly tearing things apart to fix what could have been solved earlier. You’re building on a foundation that’s already been tested, which lets you spend your energy on the parts of the work that actually need it.

Outlining isn’t about delaying the work. It’s about knowing when to stop planning and start writing—and doing both with intention.

Conclusion: Efficiency Isn’t the Enemy of Art

Outlines don’t replace creativity. They give it room to improve. Structure doesn’t diminish imagination—it sharpens it by making iteration faster and less painful. When ideas can be tested, discarded, and refined cheaply, better ones have more chances to emerge.

None of this means outlining is mandatory. If you don’t outline, that’s fine. Being a Gunslinger has real merits, especially when intuition and momentum are doing the heavy lifting. But efficiency isn’t a prison, and inefficiency isn’t freedom. Mistaking one for the other is how good ideas miss out on being great ones.