What Is Discovery Writing, Anyway?

If you’re struggling to connect with your creativity as a writer, discovery writing may be worth a try.

This post is part of a series on the methodology of discovery writing.

Intuitive writers, often known as “pantsers,” face some unique challenges. Most writing advice is created by and for rational writers, aka plotters, and intuitive writers can struggle for years, if not decades, trying to follow it without much success. One reason for this unfortunate situation is that most intuitive writers don’t know that’s what they are. They may know they’re pantsers, but still tend to see themselves as just a different kind of rational writer because that’s the only choice they’re presented with. The idea that some writers are different in fundamental ways that have to do with how their brains function is still new. With few exceptions (Lauren Sapala’s work being one), the world of intuitive writing still lacks the wealth of resources you can find for rational writers with a simple google search of “writing advice.”         

I’m going to share a writing technique I use as an intuitive writer, called discovery writing. But first, how do you know if you are an intuitive writer? Well, if a rational writing style doesn’t work for you, that’s a giveaway. Here are some challenges intuitive writers typically struggle with:

• Conceptualizing a plot

• Writing within a linear cause-and-effect structure (feedback for intuitive writers often sounds like, “But nothing changes in this scene”)

• Using outlines, plot tables, or other highly organized methodologies (while these help rational writers access their creativity, they have the opposite effect on intuitive writers)

• Finishing longer projects (this is more a function of trying and failing at rational writing techniques than anything else, but intuitive writing can take longer in general)

Another sign that you may be an intuitive writer is if you have shelves of writing advice books that haven’t worked for you.

If any of the above struggles have made you feel like you’re not a good writer, you are probably an intuitive writer to some degree. Rest assured, you are a good writer. You’ve just been using a writing methodology that doesn’t suit you. Discovery writing may be worth trying. Discovery writing isn’t a clearly defined methodology – something I’d like to change. Today I’m going to discuss some of its general characteristics, but stay tuned for future posts about specific techniques.

So what is discovery writing? It’s an exploratory method that can feel, at first, like you’re wasting time because it’s so different from what we’re taught process looks like. It’s a technique that allows your subconscious to take hold of your writing to the extent that you let go of outcome, which is very uncomfortable. However, the technique is a natural fit for intuitive writers, who usually already have well-developed skills in terms of connecting to the subconscious. The greatest challenge to learning discovery writing is that it entails the unlearning of conventional writing techniques. It also requires a deep trust in your individual process that takes time to develop. It can be a freeing, ecstatic experience when you get the hang of it. Below are some tips to get you started. Remember, this is a methodology that takes practice and is itself a practice: sitting down to try it is how you do it.

The formless first draft

If there is one thing I want to communicate about why discovery writing works, it’s this: for intuitive writers, plot is an emergent property of their writing. While rational writers first conceptualize plot and then write to fit that, intuitive writers build their story piece by piece without a clear idea of where they’re headed. Plot slowly emerges. For this reason, the first draft should be written without a final form in mind. This type of writing is a bit like brainstorming. As an example, my current novel, which is entering the second draft stage right now, is full of what I call “orphan” sentences, paragraphs, even chapters. I wrote whatever came to mind. Much of it will end up informing the final plot, but some of it – notably, a section I wrote from the perspective of a dog – probably won’t. But all of it helped me get where I’m going with the story.

The subconscious is a mapmaker: there may be one best route to a destination, but the mapmaker has to experiment with many routes in order to create a complete picture. The rule of thumb for the formless first draft is “nothing is precious, and everything is necessary.”

Regular writing

No, it doesn’t have to be every day. But to develop skills at discovery writing, you do need to have a consistent writing habit. What that looks like in practice varies among writers. Some do write every day, some once a week. When you become more adept at discovery writing, you don’t need to worry as much about consistency, but you may find, like I did, that you want to continue with the regular writing habit. Discovery writing is a technique that is used during the writing process. There’s no way around it – you have to sit down to write in order to do it.

Focus on the feeling, not the idea

We live in a society that has a strong preference for left-brain approaches to life, so a major challenge in learning discovery writing is loosening the hold intellect has over our process. There is a time for left-brain writing in the editing phases, but the first draft should be done with as little left-brain control as possible. In the first draft, what you want to focus on is what you feel you want to write, not what you think you should. What does what you’re writing feel like to you? I’m not talking character emotion here, because once you start thinking about what your characters should feel, you’re in left-brain territory again. What I mean is, what do you feel about what you’re writing? Trust what your subconscious is telling you through your feelings.

What if you sit down and having nothing to write?

That happens. Usually not often once you’ve become adept at trusting your subconscious, but it’s part of the process. Discovery writing is not efficient, nor is it logical. For anyone who prefers left-brain approaches, it looks ridiculous, wasteful, and useless. Even many intuitive writers find it too unstructured. It’s a technique I recommend to intuitive writers who are struggling with feeling that they’re not accessing their true creative potential. It really is magical if you give it a fair try. Remember: let go of outcome. Any time your brain starts to evaluate what you’re writing in terms of where it’s going, gently tell it to STFU. There’s plenty time to think about that stuff later during the second, third, fourth, etc. drafts.

And don’t worry about trying to get this “right.” It’s always just practice.

What Happened When I Decided to Stop Seeking Publication

Some encouragement for times when it’s hard to keep the faith.

[This is a companion post to How Giving Up on Productivity Can Help You Realize Your Creative Potential]

Fair warning: this story doesn’t have a happy ending. At least, not an ending characterized by a traditional success. Granted, success is a complicated idea, but here we’ll use the standard definition of “achieving a desired outcome.” Example: Andre Ingram. Guy plays basketball for ten years in the G League (the NBA’s minor league), finally gets the call at age 32 to play for the NBA, and knocks it out of the park in his first game (yeah, I know that’s a mixed metaphor but hey, I’m not a sports person). Damn, people love that story. Why? Because he kept believing and working hard, and his dream came true after years of effort. Inspiring, right? Well, there’s more to that story. But first I’m going to tell you mine.  

Here’s a hard adult truth: for every Andre, there are thousands who just don’t make it. I’m one of those people. Since childhood, I’ve wanted to be a published novelist. I’m a lot of things I’m proud of, but one thing I am not is a published novelist. I have failed. I know what you’re thinking. It’s not too late! And you’re right, it certainly isn’t. But here’s the thing: I stopped believing I would ever get published. And when you don’t believe, you don’t try anymore. 

So here’s the story. I’ve always known I’m meant to be a writer. It’s just my thing: writing makes me feel good, and I’m good at it. Not the best, by any means, but I’ve worked hard to get better, and for many years sought publication for my short stories while I worked on novels. And that’s where it all fell apart. Getting published as a writer of any kind is notoriously, hellishly difficult. I was lucky in one important respect: from the very beginning I got what are called “positive rejections,” when the editor tells you they liked your submission, even if they’re rejecting it. Once I was invited to submit additional work. These kinds of rejections are the near misses of the publishing world, and they are encouraging.

That is, at first. But if you are submitting at volume, positive rejections are only ever going to be a small proportion of your total rejections. Most are just form letter no thank yous. I even got a form letter when I submitted that invited work. And that indifferent rejection of requested work started me doubting the whole submissions process. I felt embarrassed, and even more so when I asked if they’d be willing to give me some feedback, as they’d liked my first submission, and I heard nothing. Not surprising, because seriously, why would they give me feedback? They get thousands of submissions. I get it, I really do. I’m not special. But rejection feels shitty regardless of how much you understand that.

Around this time, I found a blog by a writer who was submitting dozens of pieces (by comparison, I only had about ten finished short stories, a not unhealthy number), had a publication list in the double digits, and was still struggling at the same heartbreaking rate to get published as he had at the beginning. Reading his painful account confirmed my growing doubts about publication. There’s developing a thick skin, working hard, and keeping the faith, and then there’s destroying your spirit in a futile effort to seek acceptance from faceless people who hold an arbitrary power and give no shits about you and your dream (whew, that’s a long sentence). Around this time I was writing my dissertation as well, and one day I just decided I wasn’t going to try for fiction publication anymore. I didn’t have the heart to continue.

I decided to fail.

Could I eventually have gotten published? Who knows. I suppose if I’d kept submitting, maybe. A story here and there, over many years. But once I understood how ugly and heartbreaking the process can be, I wasn't sure how much I respected the prospect of publication anymore. Was it worth it just to be able to say I was published? No. It wasn’t. Not to me. So I dropped out of the writing rat race.

But my story doesn’t end there. As part of some post-graduation travel I spent six weeks in Guatemala, where I stayed in a little village on a lake surrounded by volcanoes. In between Spanish studies I wrote a little travel piece and entered it in a writing contest run by the company I’d purchased my travel insurance from. It was the first time I’d done any creative nonfiction, and it was the first time in years I’d completed a new piece of creative writing.

I was shortlisted. Out of 7,000+ entries, I was in the top 25. And they published my entry on their website.

Well, fuck me.

I was amazed and ecstatic that after a several-years hiatus from creative writing, I banged out a shortlist-worthy piece on my first try. But also, this put me in a quandary. The top three winners of the contest received scholarships to study travel writing with industry professionals in Peru. Being shortlisted was a major achievement, but it was also another near miss. I could take it as encouragement that I should start submitting again. . .or I could take it the opposite way. Because here’s my secret doubt and heartbreak: maybe I just don’t have what it takes. Despite being a good writer, I just don’t have it.

And that, my friends, was my real failure. My inability to believe in myself and the value of continued efforts.

I told you there was no happy ending. So now you’re wondering why you’ve even read this. Have I wasted your time? What are my great insights? The wisdom I’ve gained through heartbreak? But I think you’ve suspected all along that I have no miracle advice. No “five ways to live your dream now” bullshit. And you’re right. What I do have is the rest of Andre’s story, and mine. Andre’s first. That game where he knocked it out of the park? His team lost that game anyway. He spent a total of thirteen days as an NBA player, then returned to the G League. But you know what else? During his time playing for American University he was the school’s fifth all-time scorer. He’s played in Australia. He’s the G League leader in terms of games played and three-point field goals. He has two daughters. He tutors kids in math. He keeps going.

And here’s the rest of my story. I decided to count that shortlisted piece as a real publication. And I decided I wasn’t going to start submitting again – but that I was going to believe that I have what it takes. What that means to me now is that I keep going. I keep writing even when I feel like most of it is shit. I keep writing even when I feel crushed by the weight of wondering, what is this for? Is it worth it? Wondering and anguishing, does it mean anything at all?

Yes. It does. Because:

I wrote today.

I wrote today.

I wrote today.

How I Learned to Be Unproductive

Creating a spacious life.

Some personalities thrive on busy: time deadlines, packed schedules, multitasking, and to-do lists. You know the type – they’re always just so…well, busy. These are the people who live on the periphery of your life, because you rarely get to see them. They may complain about having so much they need to accomplish every day, but ultimately they have a life like that because they’ve invited that kind of busy into it. Many of the things they “need” to do could be postponed, delegated, or outright left undone.  

I do not have a personality that thrives on busy. Most creatives don’t, because art requires a lot of space around it in order to emerge into being. It’s not that creatives can’t learn to survive a busy life – we can grow adept at fitting creative work into small bits of time – but for many of us our natural preference is toward a slow life. A life that’s more open than closed, loose rather than tight. A life in which our meditative space (mine is long walks) isn’t spoiled by anxious thoughts of the next thing that needs to be done. A spacious life. 

If there is a silver lining to having a severe anxiety disorder, it’s that I become so easily overwhelmed by a packed schedule that I have no choice but to say no to things that “need” to get done. I began creating a spacious life out of necessity, because I was burned out to the point of being unable to do my primary creative and life-giving practice, writing. I whittled my life down to only what was absolutely required. I became a person who accomplished the bare minimum.

At first this felt horrible. My tiny daily accomplishments seemed worthless (I washed the dishes! I shopped for groceries! I paid a bill!). I was socialized to believe that only productive time has value. Think about it: is there any way to say that you did nothing all day that doesn’t sound negative? How do you communicate the value of your time to someone without listing all the things you did during it? It’s harder than you’d think. In the beginning this project of opening up my life caused its own brand of anxiety. I won’t lie – it could be miserable at times. But I felt in my gut that I was doing something important, and that it would eventually pay off.

Here’s what happened. Over time, all those bare minimum tasks began to expand to fill the space I had opened in my life. My little life-sustaining activities began to feel like sacred tasks, part of a daily generative act of living. And I became okay with long stretches of doing…nothing. Wasting time. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to do more with my time, it’s that during my recovery from burnout, I honestly wasn’t capable of much more. I had to be okay with that before I could move through that part of my healing.

In creating a more spacious life, there are significant sacrifices I’ve had to make along the way. I’ve had to reevaluate my feelings about money, for example, as I began to spend less time trying to chase it down. I learned that my best life is a slow life. The rhythm of a simplified, opened-up way of living allowed space for my creativity to reemerge. 

Eventually I was able start writing again. And through the process of creating a spacious life I realized something important. In order to be creative on a large scale I need to be able to experience the generative creativity of even the small, everyday tasks of my life. If I am only doing things to get them done, check them off a list, and prove my productivity, then I will bring that approach to my writing as well. If I keep focused on opening more space in my life, rather than filling it up with yet more busyness, I will prosper in my writing. Learning to live with slowness is more difficult than you’d think, as it goes against everything our culture outwardly values. It requires a willingness to live with the discomfort that comes from going against what our society explicitly condones as “right” choices. But for creatives like myself, it is essential to our well-being.

When You've Failed at Your Dream

Should you give up your dream if you’ve failed? That’s not the right question to ask!

I know I was born to be a writer. It’s always been about words and language for me. I even learned three other languages, I love them so much. All of my jobs, from policy analyst in DC to professional editor to academic have involved writing in some capacity. I continued to write fiction as I toiled on a PhD, splitting the writing into morning and afternoon sessions. I was doing what I always had: delegating my fiction writing to the time left over. I thought it was working well.

Then the worst happened. I stopped writing fiction. Looking back, I would call it writer’s block, but really it was more than that. I not only had no ideas for what to write, I didn’t want to write fiction anymore. This was one of the most profoundly awful feelings I’ve ever had. I’d considered myself a writer my entire life, and had pursued it seriously for over a decade at that point. To suddenly have it dawn on me, after being unable to write for a year or so, that maybe I wasn’t a writer anymore, or perhaps never was one to begin with, was disorientating and devastating.

I was at that time in my mid thirties. Maybe my lack of enthusiasm about writing was my brain telling me I needed to grow up and put away childish dreams. Maybe I’d had all my chances already, and it was time to gracefully embrace the inevitable decline in accomplishment of the second half of life (can you say midlife crisis? – haha). Of course that’s all bullshit, but at the time I genuinely felt that it could be time to accept that I’m not a writer at all. 

And I did. I came to a kind of peace about it. I didn’t write any fiction for about three years. I wrote a travel blog for a time, and then started writing a lot of what you see here on this blog, but no fiction. I had no ideas for fiction. Then one day out of the blue, I got an idea. It came in a flash and momentarily stole my breath away. I knew it was real because I could feel the excitement throughout my body. I sat with that idea, and it grew. And some months later, I started a novel. I’m still working on it, and I love writing fiction even more than I ever did. 

It feels like a miracle to be writing again, but it’s something much more mundane than that. I simply needed time to heal from the harm of my PhD. And I needed to reevaluate my relationship with fiction, come to a place where I was truly writing for myself only, because writing is who I am.

Maybe you’re in place similar place of confusion about your dream. Wondering if it’s worth continuing on. Should you give it up? I think this is the wrong question. What if what you really need to do is recalibrate your relationship with your dream? What if your long-held vision of your dream has started blocking you from pursuing it, rather than motivating you? Ask yourself how much of your dream has to do with specific outcomes, and how much with showing up to do the actual work of it. 

I had to step away from my dream entirely in order to give myself space to ask these questions. Just asking them feels like you are giving up on your dream! Trust me, I get it. I had to literally give up my dream to repossess it again on better terms. I’m telling you my story so that maybe you won’t have to go through such a painful experience. Ask your dream some hard questions – and then listen with an open heart.

You Are a Real Artist Already

Don’t think you’re a “real” artist? Here I tell you why that’s bullshit.

I’ve always secretly doubted I’m a true creative. Sure, I was always doing art or writing stories as a kid, but I knew there were more talented kids out there. My best friend in high school was so obviously more artistically talented than me that I wasn’t sure if I admired her or was deeply jealous. Both! When I started writing seriously I remember saying to her that I know I’m no Milan Kundera – who was apparently the writer I thought at that time was one of the “real” artists. I thought I was just being realistic about my talents. But actually, how I saw myself was based purely on my own insecurities. I have always undersold myself and set the bar low.

Even while I dedicated myself to writing, I felt like I was pretending. So I sought out opportunities in life that I thought would help me develop a fulfilling (and money-making) career, and I kept my art on the back burner. I never stopped writing, but I didn’t prioritize it or fully commit to it. And predictably, I didn’t find success with it. That is to say, I didn’t get anything published. I came close a number of times, but the process of submissions and rejections was so demoralizing I eventually gave it up. And then one day I found I couldn’t write. I began to believe that maybe I wasn’t a writer anymore. Maybe I had never truly been one.

You’re reading this because I eventually came out of that dark place. And I learned some important lessons along the way I want to pass on to other creatives struggling with life choices and where their art fits in to it all. All these lessons fit a philosophy of creative living I call whole-life creativity. It’s what it sounds like: creativity that is the generative source of all you do, not an activity confined to the extra minutes left over. Creativity should be how you live every moment of your life. Let me explain.

Do Art to Live

I used to think my real life was the money-making work I did, and that my art, as sacred as it was to me, was something that I would have to do on my own time. Like a hobby. I knew I’d never make money off my fiction – I don’t write best-seller material – so I found jobs that included writing, thinking they would be the closest I’d come to supporting myself doing what I love. And I wasn’t wrong about that. What I was wrong about was how I valued my writing and prioritized it. 

See, I believed I would only qualify as real writer if I was “successful” at it – that is, I earned money from it. And I knew this would never happen with my fiction. Therefore, my fiction did not deserve to be what I prioritized in my life. Real life was the work-a-day life, and my fiction was like my shadow life. Real in my own heart, perhaps, but not in the eyes of the world. None of this made me a happy person. 

A couple pivots had to happen in my perspective for my misery living this way to lift. One, I had to completely divorce art from money. In fact, I had to outright reject the idea of earning any money at all with my writing. Once this link was decoupled, I was able to begin valuing my fiction for what it brought into my life. The joy of a dedicated practice of an art. Knowing I’m a real writer because and only because I sit down and write. Writing whatever the hell I want because probably no one’s going to read it anyway.

This first pivot naturally led to the second: Writing quickly became what feeds my life. I realized that before I had simply been doing art, and that now I was living art. My approach to writing became an embodiment of a new approach to life, one that was focused on experiencing it rather than milking all my time and effort for quantifiable results. The unexpected irony of this was that I ended up writing far more than I ever had before. In developing my whole life into a practice of creativity, something in me bloomed, and the words started coming back.

Once I realized that I needed to do art to live - and not the other way around, living to do my art - everything became clear. Writing is one way I choose to express my creativity, but it is just one part of a greater art: my life. The way I live my life day in and day out, from moment to moment, is my true art. My writing isn’t just something I do during a time I set apart. It is woven through all aspects of my day. A walk I take in the morning may inspire an afternoon writing fiction; that writing session may spark something I write here. The words are always there. I just need to be open to them and listen. The same is true of any creative endeavor. The ideas are already there - and the more you open your life up to be your greatest art, the more inspired you will feel in whatever you choose as your artistic craft.