When I sat down for my first writing session of 2018, I came with all the enthusiasm inherent with a new year. I figured I could pick up where I left off 10 days earlier, when I shut down all manuscript work in favor of the Christmas holiday. 

An all-too-familiar panic, however, set in rather quickly. 

Every time I’ve gone to write a draft of my creative nonfiction novel, I manage to navigate deep into the story, but eventually, I find myself intellectually and emotionally lost. Why? I lose sight of the greater context, the big picture. 

It’s frustrating. I know the story, after all, I lived it. So why did I struggle to finish it?

Simple — I was a pantser. And it held me back.

Writers find themselves in two camps; either you are a pantser or a plotter. Pantsers write by the seat-of-their-pants, simply winging it to see where the writing and their creativity takes them. They have no patience for the focused practice of mapping [...]