When I embarked on novel writing as a hobby and eventual career (God help me), I made the mistake of attending an adult education class at a local university that had lured me with the promise of writing a book in less than a month. This wasn’t related to the popular National Novel Writing Month (“NaNoWriMo”) project. In fact, it tried to do NaNoWriMo one better by promising not a finished draft within a month but a fully realized, ready-to-publish masterpiece. Naive soul that I was, I plunked down my money and swallowed the scam whole.

The conman informed me and the other benighted dupes that all we had to do was get into a deep meditative state, express our desire to the Universe to write beautifully, and a Higher Power would use our body as Its divine instrument to compose an opus of astounding brilliance.

What could be easier?

I bought the specific pens and huge sheets of paper the conman insisted on (take note: Higher Powers prefer felt tips and don’t like to turn pages) and, of course, purchased his self-published books about his alleged journey to this state of enlightenment and how he achieved his own literary masterworks. Then, I meditated and, kneeling on my floor, wrote whatever came into my head, day after day, and the story I produced was…absolute crap.

But how could that be? Either the Higher Power who was using me as Its divine instrument was a lousy writer—or I was, which meant the whole shtick was rubbish. I wrote to the conman, asking what I was doing wrong. Apparently, I’d tapped into my Higher Power while composing my email because he was so impressed with the way I’d expressed myself that he gave me a paying job editing his newsletter, which a Divine Spark obviously didn’t compose because it needed lots of rework. Moreover, he hired me to edit his next book, a novel, for which he claimed a big-time publisher wanted “just a little polishing.”

These experiences exposed me to a lot of this guy’s writing. All of it was dreadful—and sometimes inadvertently hilarious. I knew this self-anointed literary emperor was a sham when I read the following sentence, where he was trying to describe the sense of awareness a character had as another character passed by: “From his behind, he felt a familiar wind blow.”

This experience reminded me of the song “Nothing” from A Chorus Line: if I wanted to learn how to write, I needed to find better teachers and resources. I embarked on a journey of discovery about the craft and business of writing by joining the Atlanta Writers Club, getting referrals to legitimate workshops and the best books about writing, and finding top-notch critique partners who pushed me to make my work better. And then better still.

One of the best pieces of advice I got was to outline my novel and characters in advance, so I didn’t write myself into plot corners or populate the book with clichéd people who didn’t resonate with readers. Eventually, The Five Destinies of Carlos Moreno emerged (click here for the story behind that story), and since then I have outlined my novels in advance and written fewer drafts as a result. Yes, I am flexible enough to revise my outline as new ideas occur to me—and, who knows, maybe that’s a Higher Power tapping me on the shoulder—but I’ve found that outlining my books works for me.

However, there are no rules in writing except one: you can do anything you want—just do it well.

I have friends who never outline. They’re total “pantsers” in literary parlance, writing by the seat of their pants and seeing where inspiration takes them. This works for them, and they can’t imagine being hemmed in by the outline we “planners” delight in. They hope and trust that their process will yield a satisfying story. “If I’m surprised by what happens, my readers will be surprised, too” is something one of these friends assures me. If I still did that, I’d be surprised to finish any of the projects I start. As it is, I have some manuscripts I’ll probably keep tweaking forever (no, you can’t read them).

Pantser or planner? The choice is yours. I’ve been both and discovered, in my case, that hope is not a strategy. I plan and then revise that plan. Rinse and repeat. Eventually, when I have character arcs and a plot that satisfy me, then I can start the first draft and improvise while stringing one word after another, confident in where I’m going but allowing myself to discover new ways of getting there.