If I write anything longer than a page, I need an outline, otherwise, the ideas and words slide around like quicksilver. I write what I don’t mean and I don’t mean what I write. I leave out what’s important and restate what is obvious. Worst of all, ideas don’t come out in readable order.

Sometimes, for a short piece like this one, I write what I want to say, then edit. For anything larger, fiction or nonfiction, I need a sequence sketched out beforehand, otherwise, the editing process is long and painful. For a novel, I’d be utterly helpless without a three to five-page sketch of how I see the story unfolding.

I have friends who write novels without outlines. They end up with a quarter-million words (no exaggeration) and have to cut that down to eighty or ninety thousand, a process that takes about three years. I know, because I’ve read multiple versions of those novels. I would rather eat a poisoned apple.

I can hardly comprehend what my “pantser” friends’ writing process is like. How can you write a long, complex story with multiple characters and substories without knowing where you’re going? Why would you be writing the words you’re writing and not some other words? Wouldn’t it all be arbitrary if you have no direction? I’ve asked, and they can’t tell me, at least not in a way I can understand.

Recently, I had insight into that process. I never use an outline when I compose music. Mainly, that’s because I don’t know how to compose music. I don’t even know what an appropriate outline for composition would look like. I play chords that please me, changing things as I go, and that’s my musical writing process.

Not long ago, I found a great chord sequence on the guitar that resonated through my chest, and I resolved to document what it was. I paged through my chord book and discovered I had stumbled upon GMaj7 and CMaj7. I tacked on an E minor and voila, I had invented a tiny “song” that pleased me greatly. What was it? I didn’t know.

Over the next month, I fooled around with it, adding other favorite chords. I penciled instructions to myself in my notebook. The thing grew, and I was pleased. It reminded me of Satie’s Gymnopedie Number One, so I titled the scribbles, “Ghost of Satie.”

After a couple of months of refinements, I could no longer read my notes and the Ghost of Satie threatened to become a real ghost, lost and forgotten. I challenged myself to write out what I had composed. This would be the conceptual equivalent of editing a 250 thousand-word draft novel into a coherent story that somebody could read.

It took me two months to write out Ghost of Satie, even though the whole thing only amounted to eighteen bars, so this was by no means a monumental oeuvre. Still, the process of writing in (more-or-less) standard form what I had invented was an ordeal,  partly due to my ignorance of music theory but also just because notating is a totally different experience than feeling music in your body. I’m amazed that there is any correspondence between those two experiences.

Now I know why my pantser friends hate outlines. Writing an outline must seem alien to the vision of the novel. That’s how writing out music feels in comparison to discovering and playing the sounds that you can feel. And yet, I still would not be able to write a novel without a map to navigate the story and the character arcs.

What is the difference between writing fiction and writing music, that one absolutely requires an outline (for me) and the other confronts the outline as a monumental struggle?

I look at my sheet music for Ghost of Satie (18 bars, 1.5 pages), and I am baffled. There are several chords I can’t name. They sound right when played as written, but what are they? I don’t know. What key is my piece in?  I wrote it out in C using standard time but I wonder why these chords go together and not some others. What makes these special?  I look at my music and I don’t know what I have done.

That’s how I imagine my pantser friends feel when they look at their completed first draft of a quarter-million words. “What have I done?” I can usually offer the author advice about story and character, not that it’s good advice, but that’s what writing groups do.

Maybe my musical writing experience is telling me I need to learn more theory, more about the craft. I will, if it avoids that awful process of writing notation in the dark, but on the other hand, I wouldn’t want anything to get in the way of discovering those magical chords that resonate through my chest. So now I understand the conflict of the pantsers.