A few things that shifted how I think about outlining a novel.
The Plotter vs. Pantser Frame Hides the Real Question
George R.R. Martin famously divided writers into "architects" and "gardeners." Architects draw blueprints before they build. Gardeners plant seeds and see what grows. He put himself firmly in the gardener camp, and writers everywhere latched onto the metaphor because it gave them permission to pick a side.
But here's what I keep coming back to. Martin's gardening approach has produced one of the most famously unfinished series in modern fiction. The Winds of Winter has been pending for over a decade. The plot threads of A Song of Ice and Fire have multiplied to the point where even Martin has acknowledged the difficulty of pulling them together. That doesn't mean gardening is wrong. It means that the question "are you a plotter or a pantser" was never the right question to begin with.
The question worth asking is whether your process is actually serving the story you're trying to write. Or whether you've built an identity around your process and you're protecting that identity even when it's failing you. I've seen writers refuse to outline because they've decided they're pantsers, the same way I've seen people refuse to check a map because they've decided they have a good sense of direction. Sometimes you do. Sometimes you're just lost and committed to the bit.
Pantsers Who Succeed Usually Have a Hidden Map
Diana Gabaldon wrote the first Outlander novel without an outline. She mentions this in interviews and it gets repeated as proof that you don't need one. But the part that gets left out is that she'd been writing that book as practice, with no intention of publishing it, for years before it became the novel people know. She knew her characters the way you know a friend you've had for a decade. She knew the period. She knew the world. She had, in every meaningful sense, already done the work that an outline is supposed to do.
Kazuo Ishiguro does something similar. He writes what he calls a "crash draft," four to six weeks of writing with the door closed, no editing, no rereading, just laying material down as fast as he can. It looks like pantsing from the outside. But before the crash draft, he spends months thinking. Sometimes a year. He walks around with the novel in his head, working out its emotional architecture, its structural turns, its thematic weight. His outline is detailed. He just keeps it inside his skull instead of putting it on paper.
I don't know whether that makes him a plotter or a pantser. I think it makes him a writer who figured out what he needs before he starts drafting, and the label doesn't matter much after that.