Why I Never Start with an Outline
For explorer-writers who need to discover ideas before they can organize them
There is an unspoken rule in academic writing, and most of us absorbed it without anyone stating it directly: you are supposed to know what you are arguing before you begin to write. The outline comes first. The structure comes first. The logic comes first. You draft once you have a plan, and the plan should be linear—introduction, body, conclusion, each section in its proper place—because that is what academic prose looks like when it is finished.
But finished academic prose and the process of producing it are not the same thing, and conflating them has made many of us feel like we’re doing it wrong.
Granted, for some scholars, the outline-first model works beautifully. These are what I think of as architects: writers who feel most at home when they can see the full structure of a piece before they begin drafting. They sketch the blueprint, then build the rooms. The outline gives them a container, and the draft fills it in. Their process moves in a relatively clean line from idea to structure to prose, and that linearity is not a performance—it genuinely reflects how their thinking becomes available to them.
But not everyone writes this way. And for a long time, those of us who don’t write in that manner have been quietly convinced that we should.
I’d like to introduce you to another type of writer—explorers—those of us who don’t know what we’re thinking until we write our way into our ideas.
For these writers, the outline-first model doesn’t just feel uncomfortable. It can feel genuinely impossible because an outline requires a clear sense of the argument, its hierarchy, and its sequence, which is precisely what the writing is supposed to produce. Asking an explorer to outline before writing can be a bit like asking someone to draw a detailed map of a place they have not yet walked through.
Explorers often need to write their way toward their ideas rather than write from them. They may begin with a fragment, a nagging question, a single example that won’t let them go, or a chapter that feels more alive than the project as a whole. They may draft pages that seem to circle around an idea before the idea declares itself. They may write beyond what they intended and discover something better on the other side. This is not wandering aimlessly. Such exploration is, for many writers, how thinking becomes available.
Many scholars feel the tension between the advice to create structure first and the lived experience of writing, but it may be especially acute for some neurodivergent writers.
Academic writing places unusually heavy demands on executive functions: planning, sequencing, prioritizing, sustaining attention, and moving fluidly between the big picture and the next concrete step. For some neurodivergent scholars, including some writers with ADHD, autism, or other cognitive differences, these demands can make the structure-first model feel not just unhelpful but actively alienating.
I want to be careful not to overgeneralize here because not every neurodivergent writer is an explorer, and not every explorer is neurodivergent. That said, many neurodivergent scholars have been told, implicitly or explicitly, that the way their minds move is a problem to be corrected rather than a process to be understood. For some writers with ADHD in particular, the difficulty is not a shortage of ideas but nearly the opposite: too many possible entry points, too many connections that feel alive at once, and too many directions pulling for attention simultaneously.
The challenge for many ADHD writers is not generating thought but capturing, sorting, and sequencing it long enough to turn it into the kind of reader-facing prose that academic writing requires. Telling those writers to simply “make an outline first” often doesn’t solve the problem. It just adds shame to it.
I know this shame personally because I’ve experienced it.
I now understand, however, that I am an explorer. And I have always been an explorer.
In graduate school, I felt the pressure to produce tidy outlines before I drafted anything substantial, and I dutifully tried. What I produced were outlines that looked right but didn’t actually reflect how I was thinking about the material. They were more like a performance of having a plan than a plan I could actually use. My best writing has almost always come from writing into a problem first and finding the structure afterward, not from executing a structure I built in advance. It took me years to realize I could focus on my own writing process rather than trying to fit my ideas into someone else's strategy.
Recently, one of my book coaching clients (example used with permission) came to me worried that she was doing her project wrong. She wanted to begin by working through one chapter rather than creating a full outline for the entire manuscript. She was drawn to that chapter because it was the level at which the project felt most accessible to her—she needed to understand the scope of that chapter before she could understand the scope of the book.
But because so much writing advice tells scholars to begin with the whole structure, she was concerned that it might not be the “right” way to start.
I didn’t see it that way. I saw it as information. Her mind was showing her where the project had enough traction to begin, and that is not a small thing. Beginning is one of the hardest parts of any large scholarly project, and she had found her entry point. The fact that it wasn’t the introduction, the proposal, or the full outline didn’t make it wrong. It made it hers.
Here is the distinction I consider most useful for explorer writers: academic writing usually needs to read linearly. Readers need a clear sequence: here’s the problem, here’s what I argue, here’s the evidence, and here’s what changes as a result. Academic prose is structured to move readers through reasoning in a way they can follow, and that is a genuine and important constraint.
But that constraint applies to the final product. It does not have to govern the process that produces it.
The reader needs a clear path. The writer may need to wander before she can build one. However, these needs can coexist.
They are different stages of the same project, and many explorer writers get into trouble when they treat the reader's experience with a completed piece as a prescription for how it should be written. Discovery-first writing is not an excuse to leave the reader inside your mess. It is a way of respecting the mess as a legitimate part of the process, then learning how to transform it into something a reader can follow.
If you have been writing in a way that seems exploratory, recursive, or difficult to outline beforehand, I want you to think about the possibility that this is how your thinking becomes available.
Amen Sister.
This is great! Exploratory is the way I work and have had to cultivate some of these principles myself through self reflection on my process but I also got a lot of great insights from you about how to write in this mode. There’s not a lot of good writing on how to get to clarity when you write without an outline so the temptation is to keep trying to use outlines at the outset. Thanks for this!