Paul Austin Ardoin is a USA Today bestselling mystery writer who does not outline his books, and he spent an hour on our August 5 webinar explaining why you probably shouldn’t start either.
His position is narrower and more useful than the usual plotter-versus-pantser argument. Discovery writing works. It produces the surprises that make books feel alive. What it also produces, reliably, is a specific set of structural problems, and there are outlining techniques that fix those problems without requiring you to convert.
First, name the actual problem
Ardoin’s list of what breaks when you write by discovery is worth reading slowly, because the fix depends on which one you’ve got.
Rigidly structured books resist pantsing hardest — his locked-room mystery and his time-loop mystery both fought him, because world rules that the reader is tracking don’t tolerate improvisation. Characters wander: you introduce a sidekick, they’re vivid for six chapters, and then they have no role and quietly evaporate. Plot logic leaps. Setups go missing, so a reveal that should land feels like it arrived from nowhere, and you’re back adding breadcrumbs in revision. And loose ends survive, because you got distracted by a better thread on the way to the ending you’d planned.
If you can say which of those is happening in your current draft, the rest of this is easy. If you can’t, start with the second move below.
1. Reverse-outline a book you already finished
Not the one that’s broken. A novel that worked.
Map its main beats only — Ardoin is emphatic that this should not become a book-length outline. Then look at where things actually landed. His example: you discover the dark night of the soul sat at chapter sixteen in the book that worked, and in the current draft it arrived far too early, which is why everything after it feels drawn out.
That gives you a structural fact about your own writing rather than a rule from someone else’s craft book. Even one data point — “the dark night has to come a bit past halfway” — is enough to diagnose the next three books.
2. Ask a question instead of following a rule
When Ardoin writes himself into a corner, he goes for a walk with one question. What does this character need to find here to get closer to the reveal, or to go down a wrong but entertaining path. What does she need in order to move the plot forward. Do I need to back up two or three chapters to make this work.
The questions come from the collision between where you’re stuck and what you like about discovery writing in the first place. That’s the whole technique, and it’s the one he uses most.
3. Pretend you’re good at outlining
He borrowed this from author friends and it’s the best trick in the session.
Ask yourself: if I were good at outlining, what would my outline for this next chapter be?
The framing matters. Plenty of writers have decided, as a fact about their identity, that they can’t outline. Asking the hypothetical routes around that and gets you a usable answer, because you were never actually incapable of it.
4. Take pieces of the frameworks, not the frameworks
Ardoin walked through the three-act structure, the monomyth, the Snowflake Method, the 12-chapter mystery, and using five-paragraph essay structure at chapter level. He uses fragments of several and none of them whole.
The Snowflake Method is a good example of honest disagreement. Its inventor wants pages of development including a one-page synopsis from every character’s point of view. Ardoin describes that as completely antithetical to how his brain works — and then says he knows pantsers it has helped, because being forced to define the fuzzy areas is exactly the point for some writers.
The most portable single piece he named comes from the 12-chapter mystery template. Around chapter three or four, the sleuth hits a personal problem. Three or four chapters from the end, they resolve it, and that resolution is the mindset change they needed to solve the case. Ardoin notes this transfers cleanly to action-adventure, crime fiction, and romance with a deception thread. Genre labels aside, it’s a way of tying the interior arc to the exterior one on a schedule.
A related and much lower-effort version: keep the generic shape of an outline on a sticky note next to your monitor. Sometimes the loose structure is all that’s needed to keep a draft from going off the rails.
5. Perfect is the enemy of complete
His closing line, and it was aimed at a specific person: the writer newly interested in plotting who now believes they need a perfect outline before they’re allowed to start.
The outline is a tool for fixing a problem in your book. It isn’t a credential, and it doesn’t have to be finished, correct, or pretty. Ardoin edits his own outlines constantly as the draft teaches him things.
The point
The goal is to fix what’s broken in your novels, not to become a plotter. Take what works. Ignore the rest.
Paul Austin Ardoin’s session replay is available in the IAT Campus. He also covers reader expectations and structure in more depth in his author guide From Zero to Four Figures.