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If you spend any time among a group of novelists, you will pretty quickly hear two terms: pantsers and plotters.

Pantsers are the ones who prefer to write by the “seat of their pants.” They love to develop a great opening, then discover the story as they write. Pantsers get bored if they know where the whole story is going ahead of time.

Plotters are the ones who have to carefully outline the whole plot of a novel before they begin writing. They need to know where the story is going or they can’t start.

Lots of writers have taken either approach and created great novels, short stories, and other works of art. Plotting can work just as well as pantsing when it comes to writing a fiction story. But it doesn’t work so well when it comes to your real-life story—the story of your writing career and your journey as a writer.

The truth is that the writing life is unpredictable. We don’t know where it is going. Every new piece of writing you produce is a new opportunity to reach people. 

Not only that, but your skill as a writer keeps growing every time you write and publish. When you combine all that with the constant changes in technology today, there is no way to predict where anything is going.

If you like to plot things out, and you don’t like surprises, this can be disconcerting because you don’t know where your writing will take you. It’s also tempting to want to focus on those parts of your life and experience that will take you where you think this is all going.

But all of your life experiences are fodder for your writing. Everything you’ve been through, every job you’ve had, every emotion, every relationship you’ve started or ended … they’re all part of this wonderful, unpredictable, mysterious journey of writing.

In his amazing book Steal Like an Artist, Austin Kleon wrote, “Don’t throw any of yourself away. Don’t worry about a grand scheme or a unified vision for your work. Don’t worry about unity–what unifies your work is the fact that you made it. One day, you’ll look back and it will all make sense.”

Don’t try to figure this all out. Just do the work every day and enjoy the journey. If you knew the ending ahead of time, it wouldn’t be any fun, now would it?