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I am a "pantser", or as we PREFER to be called, a Discovery Writer. So is Stephen King.

I typically begin a story without knowing the ending, or the plot, or all of the characters.

What I do have is a very strong idea of a main character, that my story will be about. She is usually female, and I always write in third-person-limited; so the reader knows her thoughts (at least every important thought, I don't conceal anything she knows to spring as a surprise later).

Thus far I have not written magic; but she will have some "superpower", not magical but she will be extremely good at that, and she will have some superflaw, something she is decidedly NOT good at it.

Then she will be presented with a problem that gives her very few opportunities to use her superpower, and demands instead the one skill she really sucks at.

That is what I know when I begin writing. I also know the structure of a story, by percentages; broken down into parts of about 5% or 10%. I have gone into that elsewhere; but what it means is that I know by the word count or page number what *kind* of scenes I am looking to write, based on how far into the book I am. Character building scenes, complications, resolutions, etc.

I also start with some vague idea of how the central problem could be solved, but that changes several times during the course of the book. Every ending I have written actually came to me about halfway through the book, when I am trying to devise the lowest point for my hero. 

In the end, it is usually that she had to become competent in the skill she sucked at, and use it successfully to open the door to using her superpower to finally solve the main dilemma.

As Stephen King says in his book *On Writing*, every story has to come out somewhere, as long as you don't let your characters stall out.

We call it "Discovery Writing" because we find the story as we go. It can involve a great deal of rewriting, deletions, and realizing things like "Oh, **that's** what this story is really about!".

The **reason** I am a Discovery writer is because I tried, at least three times, to plot out a story like I had read we should do, and I came up with one, but then writing to an outline wasn't fun, it just felt like work and my characters felt wooden and forced. I didn't like it, and the spark of *inventing* the story was gone. I never finished any of those stories. The first time I read about discovery writing, and tried it, is the first time I completed a whole story of 100,000 words. I have never looked back.