Art & Creativity Quote by Jerry B. Jenkins

Jenkins is confessing a craft heresy with a workman’s shrug: after a career built on intuition, he tried planning. The casual emphasis on SOON signals a small seismic shift. Outlining, in writing culture, isn’t just a technique; it’s a tribe. Pantsers romanticize the plunge, plotters trust the blueprint. Jenkins frames his old method as “discovery,” a word that flatters instinct by making it sound like exploration rather than improvisation. Then he lands the metaphor: “Like working without a net.” It’s stagecraft language, not ivory-tower theory, and it’s doing a lot of persuasion.

A net implies danger, performance, and the possibility of a public fall. That’s a novelist talking to other writers (and anxious readers) about reliability. The subtext is professional: deadlines, series expectations, and commercial fiction’s demand for clean arcs don’t always reward wandering. Outlining becomes less a creative compromise than a risk-management tool, the kind of adjustment a veteran makes when the stakes are high and the margin for narrative dead ends is low.

There’s also an implicit defense against the anti-outline snobbery that floats around “serious” writing discourse. Jenkins isn’t apologizing for structure; he’s reframing it as an evolved form of courage. The old bravado was leaping without a net. The new bravado is admitting that the net can free you to attempt bigger tricks. In a market that prizes pace and payoff, that’s not selling out; it’s sharpening the instrument.