Toward a Methodology of Discovery Writing: What is Writing For?

Figuring out why you write can point you toward your method.

In December last year I wrote a post about discovery writing that got a positive response. I realized it’s a topic people want to read more about. There isn’t much good information out there about discovery writing, and I’d like to change that. One of my projects for 2021 is to create a collection of resources on my blog about discovery writing and its practice: a methodology of discovery writing (find all my posts on discovery writing here).

The most common advice available on discovery writing amounts to “just sit down and write whatever comes into your head.” That’s not really helpful, is it? There’s obviously more to it than that, but no one seems to know exactly what discovery writing is, how it operates, and what type of writer it serves. Discovery writing isn’t, and cannot be, a free-for-all where you vomit your brain effluvia onto the page. You may have heard of “morning pages,” a common discovery writing practice in this vein recommended by Julia Cameron. I love Julia Cameron’s work (seriously, check it out if you haven’t already), but I absolutely loathe morning pages. I am not a morning person. Nor do I enjoy writing to no purpose at any other time of day. Morning pages can be a great discovery writing technique if they work for you, but for me they result in the most depressing, useless crap you’ve ever read. Plus, they don’t in and of themselves constitute a methodology of discovery writing. As far as I know, such a methodology doesn’t exist.

Developing one requires an understanding of the underlying functions of writing itself. For this I had to turn to the academic literature, and while I’ve made only a preliminary survey, I have enough to begin. Today I’m focusing on the central question informing different writing processes: What is writing for? That is to say, what is its purpose? Your answer to this to some extent dictates your writing process, and is thus the first step in creating a methodology.

Most people would agree that writing serves two major functions. The first is as a method of communication; the second, a mode of self-expression. The first is the “classical” view of writing: you have an idea of what you wish to say, and you formulate the expression of that through a process of knowledge retrieval and in accordance with the style constraints of your genre. The second is the “romantic” view of writing: you cannot know what you are writing until it is actually written, because the act of writing itself is where the meaning creation occurs. This type of writing is knowledge-constituting and recursive.* Classical writing is logic-driven, whereas romantic, or discovery, writing is intuitive. The former is a way of communicating knowledge, the latter a method of understanding the self, i.e. of being and becoming the self in the world.

It’s because of this last point that discovery writing is particularly attractive to INFPs, of which I am one, because we understand the world through understanding our own emotional responses to it. If your answer to the question I pose – What is writing for? – is that it’s only secondarily a method of communication, but primarily a way for you to understand the world and what it means to you, you are a discovery writer at heart. The discovery part of discovery writing is only in part what you end up putting on the page. It’s also yourself that you are discovering through writing, and in so doing, you are constituting a meaningful world.

The difference here is one of causality. In the classical view, writing is an effect of knowledge, and the causal arrow is linear. In discovery writing, knowledge and writing are mutually causal: the arrow is circular and iterative. The problem with seeing knowledge and writing as separate and linked only linearly, is that we cannot possibly represent our complex thoughts completely through writing. If you’ve ever felt that you just can’t seem to get onto the page what you see in your head, it’s because that’s true: you can’t. However, discovery writing can get you closer because it allows you greater access to your subconscious and is itself part of the process of knowledge generation.

For those of you out there who are discovery writers or want to learn more about it, come along with me this year as I learn more about it myself!

*Information for this section comes from Galbraith, D. (2009), “Writing as Discovery,” British Journal of Educational Psychology 1: 5-26, available here.