To Outline or Not to Outline

WHAT I'M WORKING ON: Writing ENIGMA, a YA steampunk novel: at 23k of 80k words. 29% complete. Waiting for editorial revision letter on THE FAERIE RING.

We were recently chatting in one of my critique groups about 'how do you write?' Do you outline or not? Though common sense tells me that outlining would make my writing process SO much easier, I can't do it. I simply cannot produce an outline for a work in process. Why, you ask? Well, when you cut to the chase, it's because I usually don't know what's going to happen. Now, often I'll have a random idea or two that I know is going to occur. But a lot of the time I don't even know the ending, until... well...the end.

Of course, one famous example of a writer who ..ahem... successfully outlines would be JK Rowling. She outlined the Harry Potter series for an entire YEAR before she started writing the first book. Brilliant, obviously, but has anyone ever mentioned PATIENT? Hello?

Does the lack of outlining slow me down, not knowing where I'm going? Sometimes, but not really. I'll hit certain stages in my plot where I get stuck and I have to ponder things for a few days. And it's amazing how your brain is percolating in the background and you don't even know it. Then all of a sudden you have one of those aha! moments and you suddenly know why your character did a certain thing and what's going to happen next. But I think that would still occur even with an outline, because we all know, characters can be incredibly independent at times. But I'd say overall, that the lack of an outline doesn't make the process any longer for me.

Often, as we perfect this craft of writing, we're encourage to "read like a writer", i.e. analyze and dissect the good and bad of the books we read so that we can then apply this knowledge when we write our own story. Well, I always joke that I 'write like a reader' - I'm always wondering what's going to happen next!

I was feeling a bit guilty about this, because I'm pretty organized in my business life and it seems like outlining a book I'm writing should be an easy thing to do. But I was poking around Jane Yolen's site the other night, (yes, Jane Yolen, guru of writing fantasy novels, author of more than 300(!) books) and I was thrilled to find that she had written this about her own writing process:

"I generally do not think out plots or characters ahead of time. I let things roll along. Organic is the word I use for this. But actually I do it because I am a reader before I am a writer. I want my own writing to surprise me, the way someone else’s book does. If I think out everything ahead of time, I am–in Truman Capote’s words–”Not a writer but a typewriter.”

So, I immediately felt better. But I'm curious - what about you? Do you outline? Or are you an organic, let 'er rip, write on the fly kind of writer?