Toward a Methodology of Discovery Writing: What Does Discovery Writing Look Like?

Envisioning a methodological structure to discovery writing can help us feel more confident about process.

One of my 2021 projects is to develop a methodology of discovery writing, as there’s not much out there about how to do it. Discovery writing has the potential to be a powerful technique for intuitive writers, and it was only after I started working on intentionally developing my discovery writing skills that I felt like I came into my own as a writer. As I work toward understanding discovery writing through doing it, I’m simultaneously conducting a survey of the research literature on it, and I’m sharing what I learn here on this blog. In my last post in this series I discussed the difference between “classical” and “romantic” writers, and which is more likely to find value in discovery writing (you can find all my posts on discovery writing here). Today I will be discussing what discovery writing actually looks like in a broad sense, as having a picture in your mind of what discovery writing “looks” like can help you feel more confident in the process.

The act of doing discovery writing can feel unstructured, and the result of it can also seem to lack structure – for example, intuitive writers who use the technique often struggle with conceptual aspects of writing projects, like plot. Discovery writers often struggle to trust their process because it feels so…undisciplined and unbounded. It requires a relinquishing of control over process that is very difficult for people socialized into rational/analytical approaches to, well, everything (as we all are in modern societies). Having a mental picture of the discovery writing process, a view-from-above of how it’s done, can give the writer a sense of methodological structure. This may not be necessary for some discovery writers, but speaking for myself, I have historically lacked confidence in my writing method because it doesn’t look like the “preferred” rational approach to writing: the linear, conceptual style espoused by most writing advice resources. Most resources out there on discovery writing present it simply as a technique, rather than its own methodology on par with rational methodologies.

Discovery writing is more than just the writing part of it. It is actually a mediation between writing and mental processing. Picture it as a spiral. Neither writing nor processing comes first, or rather, either can, but for the sake of this visioning, let’s say you write first. You create a scene. Then you mentally process what you’ve written. This can happen consciously, but is usually unconscious. Then you write again, then you process, and so on. You are constantly going in and out of a flow state in which the writing occurs (I will be exploring both processing and the flow state in future posts). This processing isn’t an intentional thing – it happens at any time throughout the day and generally can’t be forced. It can happen while we’re sleeping or in the shower. Processing results in a better understanding of your characters and story, and whether or not you are consciously aware of that better understanding, it is what comes out the next time you sit down to write. So the two main parts of discovery writing are writing and processing, which are iterative and mutually constituting.

The challenging part is the mediation between the two. While some writers may be able to sit down and let their processed stuff come out just like that, I’ve always struggled with a feeling of resistance. It’s difficult to enter the flow state of discovery writing, when you lose conscious awareness of your surroundings and the passage of time. This is the state in which writers feel that the words are writing themselves, and it is the very essence of discovery writing. It feels great to be in that flow state, but getting there is deeply challenging for anyone who has difficultly relinquishing control and feels distrustful of letting the subconscious take over. Which is probably most of us. What is needed is a buffer zone between regular life and discovery writing time. This is where “writingrealm” and “fictionworld” come in.

I came across these terms in an article* by the Dr. Charlotte Doyle, a scholar of psychology and the creative writing process. She interviewed five fiction writers on process, and noticed striking similarities between them. All described entering a kind of cognitive mode prior to writing. So they would leave regular life and enter this cognitive space, the writingrealm, before entering writing time, i.e. fictionworld. Doyle calls writingrealm a “distinctive sphere of experience.” It is defined by three very specific feelings. They are: solitariness and singularity; a self-conscious sense of self-as-writer; and a purposeful, yet receptive, will-to-write. Note that these are feelings. While some writers may only be able to feel solitary in a space where they are alone, other writers feel that sense of singularity, of being-alone, in a coffee shop. The sense of the self-as-writer is that deep-seated feeling of inhabiting the identity of writer, of you and writer being one and the same. The will-to-write must be both purposeful and receptive, because the purposefulness is only meant to take you to the moment of beginning to write. From there, you must enter a zone of receptivity.

I find that when I am feeling resistance toward entering fictionworld, the discovery writing flow state, it helps immensely to first enter writingrealm. For me, this is both a physical space and time - my office at night, with just one dim bulb on over my chair - and a mental space and time - the feeling of solitariness, singularity, being-alone and intention+receptivity. Envisioning this as a buffer zone, a sort of green room to the main stage of discovery writing, mentally prepares me for that stepping-off-the-cliff feeling of letting go and merging into the stream of discovery writing flow. Give it a try, and see how it works for you! In the next installment of this series, I’ll be taking a look at fictionworld, so stay tuned!

*Doyle, Charlotte L, 1998. “The Writer Tells: The Creative Process in the Writing of Literary Fiction.” Creativity Research Journal 11 (1): 29-37. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15326934crj1101_4 (I unfortunately haven’t been able to find an open access version of this article).

Where Creativity Resides: Making Space For Your Essential Creative Self

What are we missing because of our rational conditioning?

This blog post is now a podcast episode!

(This is a follow-on post to last week’s. I guess I just wasn’t finished with this topic!)

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about how our socialization into the rational paradigm of understanding the world results in negative outcomes that we’re largely unaware of. In last week’s post, I looked at how our societal preference for rational cognition can impede creative thinking. The reasons for this have to do with how different, even contradictory, rational and creative modes of cognition are. For those who are very entrenched in the logical, analytical, causal model of rational thinking, the ambiguous, often even paradoxical, nature of creative thought goes against everything they’ve been taught about how the world works and what comprises intelligent understanding. Today I want to explore another pitfall of exclusively using the rational paradigm to understand the world: an associated tendency to overlook information that cannot be understood via a rational approach.

This is an ironic pitfall, because what I’m talking about here is a version of the confirmation bias, a type of cognitive bias that rationalism is very keen on eliminating. A confirmation bias is the tendency to seek out or only recognize information that confirms previously held beliefs. A rational approach to creating knowledge about the world has failed if it falls prey to confirmation bias. The problem is that the rational approach is itself a biased perspective, so inevitably it can only be used to understand phenomena that adhere to rational standards. Not everything does.

We know this already, of course. Scientific approaches to understanding human behavior, for example, are imperfect, because human beings can be irrational. Behavioral economics is a field that arose because older models of humans as rational “utility maximizers” were failing to be sufficiently explanatory. It is possible to study irrational aspects of our world through a rational approach. What concerns me, however, are the things we are not even aware of because of our rational cognitive bias. We tend to dismiss out of hand anything that cannot be rationally explained. And no, I’m not talking about paranormal or similar phenomena here. I’m talking about what our intuitive, creative natures already understand: that reality is pure potentiality and paradoxical. As conscious beings we live in a world that we must at least partly understand rationally, but our creative selves reside in that plane of pure potentiality and paradox.

Creativity exists outside of time. It is nonlinear and anti-analytical. Sure, we can practice creativity within a rational framework, but it will only be a shadow of itself, a projection on a screen, a second-hand version. If you feel like you are forcing your creative practice, it’s because your rational mind has you in a stranglehold. Creativity can feel free, easy, and joyful. It can feel life-giving, life-sustaining. It can heal. But it needs free reign to do that.

The rational mind likes things to be onerous, because rational thought is itself effortful and time-consuming. But creative thought is light and lighting fast. It works by flashes of inspiration, not linear, progressive reasoning. For those flashes to occur, there must be space. You must let your creative self reside in that plane of pure potentiality, the place of nonsense and no-time. And that’s scary. It goes against everything we’ve been taught is right, correct, sane, beneficial, rational. The good news is that you don’t have to make all the space for creativity to shine. Just a little bit of space. A crack. Creativity is like water or light – it is irrepressible, and it will find that crack. But these cracks aren’t where creativity gets in. It’s where the creativity that already resides in you gets out, and shines its light into the world.

I’ll leave you with a passage from Alan Lightman’s novel Einstein’s Dreams. Lightman is a theoretical physicist who was one of the first people to receive a joint appointment in the sciences and humanities at MIT. Einstein’s Dreams is a collection of mini-essays about the nature of time, and each one describes a dream Einstein has about a world where time works in unique and sometimes non-rational ways. In one, causality gets mixed up. Cause and effect are erratic and random, effect sometimes occurring before cause.

Einstein dreams: In this acausal world, scientists are helpless. Their predictions become postdictions. Their equations become justifications, their logic, illogic. Scientists turn reckless and mutter like gamblers who cannot stop betting. Scientists are buffoons, not because they are rational but because the cosmos is irrational. Or perhaps it is not because the cosmos is irrational but because they are rational. Who can say which, in an acausal world?

In this world, Einstein dreams, artists are joyous. Unpredictability is the life of their paintings, their music, their novels. They delight in events not forecasted, happenings without explanation, retrospective… It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity. It is a world in which every word spoken speaks just to that moment, every glance given has only one meaning, each touch has no past or no future, each kiss is a kiss of immediacy.

Do Intuition and Creativity Use the Same Cognitive Processes?

Enhance creative capabilities by learning how to stop applying the rules of rational cognition to your process.

This blog post is now a podcast episode!

As an INFP and/or INFJ (I’m not sure which I am!), I’ve become used to using the terms intuitive and creative to describe myself. I always saw these two skills as inherently different from each other. As I’ve learned more about the workings of creativity, however, I’ve come to understand that the reason intuitive and creative abilities are often co-occurring is because they function in strikingly similar ways. In fact, creativity may be simply a variation of intuitive cognition. If this is true, we are repressing our creativity when we insist on rational approaches. If you are struggling to tap into your creativity, questioning your socialization into rational, analytical styles of thinking is a good place to start.

Both intuition and creativity rely on similar cognitive functions: pattern recognition and analogical thinking.* Intuition is an understanding you arrive at when your brain subconsciously compares many different past experiences and knowledge, pulls out relevant pieces of information, and synthesizes it all into a new understanding. This manifests as the “a-ha” moment intuitives often talk about. Creativity is the ability – often at least party unconscious – of being able to compare disparate pieces of past experiences and knowledge and put them together in unexpected ways to produce a novel understanding, solution, or product. You can see how the processes are similar, though their purpose and the conscious experience of them may differ.

Intuitive/creative ability is actually a kind of intelligence, though in our society we don’t really recognize it as such because we have a very limited view of intelligence. We categorize it as a facility with logical, deliberate, and conscious thinking. In this rational perspective of intelligence, the latter is particularly important: you must be able to explain how you came to a certain conclusion through a step-by-step, linear process of reasoning and/or evidence confirmation. Intuitive/creative intelligence does not allow for such explication, as it is unstructured and nonconscious, nor does it adhere to the rules of logic. It is therefore categorized as something other than intelligence.

Intuitive/creative intelligence is native to human beings just as is our capacity for rational thought, so in that sense we all have intuitive and creative abilities. But because we are taught that it is a “lower” form of cognition, untrustworthy, and irrational, we grow up discounting it as a valid way of experiencing and understanding the world. This can have profound effects on our ability to be creative. We can enhance our creativity by not applying the rules of rational cognition to our intuitive/creative cognition process. But how? Let’s look at a few of the big no-nos of the rational approach, and why they work directly against intuitive/creative thinking.

Centering yourself in the knowledge formation process.

The major tenet of the scientific approach, which represents our highest form of the rational process, is that you must remove yourself from your research. Your job is to be an unbiased conduit of knowledge formation and communication; to discover objective truths. The whole point of scientific study is to create universal knowledge that is verifiable through a replicable process, i.e. scientific experiment. Intuitive/creative cognition does not do this. It results in knowledge that is neither explicable (because you arrive at it largely through unconscious thought) nor verifiable or replicable. It is based on your personal experiences of being yourself in the world. You must center yourself when using intuitive/creative cognition – and the knowledge you create is valuable because of your personal bias.   

Using feeling as a method of knowledge confirmation.

It goes without saying that rational approaches to knowledge formation do not use personal feeling as a method of verification. A scientist does not decide which results are accurate based on their feelings. There is no “I think this is true because it feels right” in science! But in the intuitive/creative cognitive process, feeling is the measure that is used to identify what is true – true for you. What challenges us more than any other thing about using the intuitive/creative approach is that it results in knowledge that may only be true for us, and not match what is true for others. Our societal preference for the rational approach tells us we should distrust such knowledge because we are not able to validate it externally.

Trusting knowledge that cannot be verified.

In rational models, there is a correct (i.e. objectively correct) answer; in intuitive/creative models, there is no such thing. Exactness or accuracy are not evaluations that are relevant to intuitive/creative knowledge, but our conditioning in the rational approach causes us to use those evaluations anyway. This leads to second-guessing ourselves and what we know, and it can also lead to us losing confidence in our creative output. Think of it this way. How ridiculous would it be to think that getting an almost right answer to a math problem is totally fine if, say, you’re designing a space shuttle? Reverse that: it’s equally ridiculous to try to apply such rational precision to intuitive/creative thinking. We cannot judge a work of art, for example, by how accurately it represents reality or whether it was created in the “correct” way. Release your intuitive/creative cognition from such shackles! There is no “right” answer in any objective sense. Intuitive/creative intelligence is about trusting yourself.

We are trained to distrust and discount information and knowledge that come to us through a non-rational, i.e. intuitive, cognitive process. But if intuition and creativity are similar types of cognition, we are also inadvertently repressing our creativity when we try to apply the rules of rational thinking to our own understanding and experience.

*This essay is partly informed by a paper entitled Intuition and Creativity (Ul-Haq, 2015; open access). It cites a lot of the research on this and related subjects and is a good place to start if you want to delve in deeper.

Cultivating a Generalist Mindset for the New Era

Not an expert at anything? Maybe that’s a good thing.

This blog post is now a podcast episode!

I had a friend who said one day, apropos of nothing, “I want to be an expert. I don’t care what in, I just want to be an expert in something.” I wish I’d asked him then what it was about being an expert that he desired. I can’t ask him now, because he’s passed away, and I don’t know if he ever became an expert in anything. But I’ll always remember that offhand comment, because in a way, I understood what he meant. We admire experts in our society, as well we should. Most spend years learning their subject and know what they’re talking about. We should be listening to them. Except we often favor experts, i.e. specialists, at the expense of generalists, and that’s problematic, because generalists have so much to offer, especially now.

Generalists don’t have much cachet in our society. Even the term “generalist” sounds inferior, doesn’t it? It has that flavor of the dilettante about it: jack of all trades, master of none. Unfortunately, we tend to see generalists as people who haven’t put the time and commitment into becoming a specialist, perhaps because they’re too lazy or scatterbrained. But what if generalism is actually its own brand of specialist knowledge? What if generalists are valuable because they’re not experts in one specific area? Should we all be trying to cultivate a generalist mindset?

I think we should, and here’s why. The world is changing, and along with it, all the rules. We’re in an era of tremendous shift: our former reality is dying and a new one is forming. We all feel it, and most of us are scared. But if you have multiple talents and interests, you have a greater chance of thriving. The old world was set up for specialists. We were expected to specialize, each a cog in the machine. And now that machine is becoming obsolete. The highly specialized cogs, the ones that are only good at doing that one thing they were constructed to do, aren’t going to fare so well. Generalists will have an easier time repurposing their talents to match circumstances.

Here’s the good news: we are all natural generalists. We are all multitalented, but we’re not trained to see ourselves that way. Not sure what you have to offer the world? You’re already doing it, I can guarantee you. Take a look at your life, the activities you come back to again and again, that you’ve committed time and energy to. What do you always want to learn more about? What do you spend money you don’t have on? And perhaps most importantly, what do you find yourself “wasting” time on? It may not be obvious at first how it all fits together. Let me give you an example.

The generalist Tim Ferriss, most known for his enormously popular podcast and his bestseller The 4-Hour Work Week, found his first success with a sports supplement company he started from scratch. As a college student he used to mix up his own supplement powders from specialized mail-order ingredients. He combined this interest with skills and contacts he gained from a sales job he had at an IT firm just before the dot-com bust. But here’s the cool part. It wasn’t the sales job that made him so good getting people to buy his product. It was insomnia. As a kid, he couldn’t sleep, and he’d watch TV all night. And what’s on TV at night? Infomercials. He became obsessed with sales techniques, even calling up the companies to see how they attempted to close the deal once they had you on the phone. Because Tim Ferriss had insomnia and wasted all that time watching useless late-night television, and because he was obsessed with supplement formulas, he was able to become a successful entrepreneur.

What are you wasting your time, energy, or money on? What are the useless things in your life that might not actually be so useless?

Here’s the secret successful generalists understand: what you have to offer the world isn’t any one particular skill, talent, or area of knowledge, or even a combination of them. What you have to offer is YOU. Your whole self. You are your own brand. And what that means is that everything about your life is valuable in terms of the skills, knowledge, and experience it confers. Your job is to learn how to see it that way, how to value yourself and your experiences in a way that allows you to put it all together and manifest that in the world. Trust yourself. Follow your curiosity. Pay attention to your obsessions. And don’t ignore your wasted time and useless pastimes. All of it is you, and therefore all of it has value.

Sometimes Doing Nothing Gets the Best Result

If you’re feeling unmotivated, fear not! Sometimes what you need to do is nothing at all.

Some years ago, a friend sent me a children’s book called What Do You Do With An Idea? I was excited to read it, because I’m an idea person. I have lots of them, all the time. But at the time this book appeared in my life, I was feeling deeply unmotivated about everything. I had burnout and wasn’t able to act on my ideas. My life was stagnant; I was stuck. I was filled with an urgency to do something – anything! – to effect change in my life. And here was a book that was going to tell me how. I read it with eager anticipation. What was the secret it would reveal?

Here’s what it said I should do with my ideas. Nothing.

Yep. It’s about a kid who hangs out with an idea he has and that’s about it. He feeds it and they play together. The idea grows, and he builds a new home for it. It teaches him how to walk on his hands, because that will help him see things in new ways. Then one day the idea takes wing and the kid discovers what you do with an idea: “You change the world.” Okay, except he didn’t really do anything with the idea except spend time with it! How does that change the world? Notably missing from this narrative are the step-by-step plans of how to use the idea to change in the world. Where is the goal setting, the list of pros and cons, the projected costs? Where is the struggle, the arduous journey, the courageous crusade? How can an idea change the world when you don’t do anything with it?!

Okay, let’s calm down for a minute. Take a breath. Children’s books are supposed to be full of timeless wisdom, right? So I sat with this little fable for a while, letting it percolate. When that failed to enlighten me, I decided to do an experiment. I’d try doing nothing and see what happened. It wouldn’t be hard – I was feeling so unmotivated about everything that doing nothing was basically what I was already doing. Except I would do it intentionally now. Instead of doing nothing because everything just felt so hard, I’d try doing nothing because maybe it was the inspired choice, a way to make magic happen.

And guess what happened? Nothing. Shocking, right? Except that’s not entirely true. Nothing big happened, sure. My life didn’t change, I didn’t feel more motivated, I was still stuck. But I noticed that my ideas started getting more…well, sparkly. Now that I wasn’t expending energy forcing myself to do something, anything, or on feeling bad about not getting anything done, I had a lot more to put into my ideas. The new attention I gave them made them feel more present, rounder, real. Like things that maybe could manifest in the world, if I gave them a chance.  

There was this one little idea I’d pushed away because it seemed too big for its britches, and I started thinking about it more. It was about starting my own creative business, hanging out my signpost as a creativity coach, starting a podcast. Yeah right, I thought. Who would want to listen to me? But I decided I’d give the idea a chance, and we hung out together. I’ll admit it, we had fun dreaming about life together. But that was all it was. An idea. I still didn’t know how doing nothing about it was supposed to change the world.

But the idea grew, just like it said in the book. And then one day the idea was so big I decided to make a webpage for it. A new home, just like it said in the book. And then it taught me how to walk on my hands – just kidding. But I did start to see things in new ways. Like, maybe this could be a real thing, my creative business. Maybe this idea was worth it. Maybe I’m worth it. So I continued hanging out with the idea, doing whatever felt like the next right thing. I’m still doing that now, even when the next right thing is doing nothing.

It feels magical how much this approach has changed my life. It did change the world – my world. Sure, sometimes I’m busy and getting a lot accomplished, but by maintaining my focus on only doing what feels like it’s the next right thing, I end up not doing a lot, too. Because I’m not doing things because I should or just to get them done, I’m free to do what emerges organically from the situation. And what I’ve discovered is that life doesn’t require us to do all that much. Our sociocultural beliefs are what require us to do all the things. And those are just beliefs. We can challenge and change them if we want to.

So try hanging out with your ideas rather than seeing them in terms of actionable steps, efficient practices, and productivity goals. Maybe they’ll have something to teach you. Maybe they need space to grow some more. They’ll speak to you if you listen, and they may even be able to point you in directions you wouldn’t have considered. Be patient, open-minded, and kind to your ideas, let them know they can trust you, and they’ll show you the way.

Is Being a Gentle Soul Actually a Benefit in Tumultuous Times?

Gentle souls have personality traits that are counterintuitively adaptive in times of crisis.

During tumultuous times like those we’re all experiencing right now, it would be easy to assume that gentle souls are at a disadvantage. When you are an introverted, sensitive type living in a society that values extraversion and bold aggressiveness, you grow up feeling maladapted to your environment in general, unsuited to thriving “out there” in the world. And you’re not imagining things. Us gentle souls end up taking a back seat or outright fading into the woodwork not just because that’s where we feel most comfortable, but because those are the positions we’re forced into in a society that doesn’t value our skillset.

And now the world is changing, and fast. Many people are being forced to pivot, redefine their lives, reimagine their futures – and reestablish their emotional and psychological equilibrium on what feels like constantly shifting ground. It would be easy to think that people with those go-getter, outwardly positive personality traits like extraversion and competitive spirit would be better at these things. But I’ve observed something rather astonishing over the course of the last year of the pandemic and related economic and political upheaval. Among people I know, those who possess gentle soul traits have seemed to fare better or have actually thrived, contrary to all expectation. Could it be that gentle souls have personality traits that are adaptive in difficult times? 

An obvious one is introversion. Those who are both adept at being alone and require alone time on a regular basis have almost certainly weathered the enforced quarantines and isolation of the pandemic better than extraverts. I know a number of introverts who feel their quality of life has increased substantially with work-from-home (those fortunate enough to be able to do this with their jobs). Their productivity has increased along with their peace of mind. But what about those other traits of gentle souls: the sensitivity, aversion to aggressive competitiveness, and well, gentleness? Even if you are a gentle soul who hasn’t felt these characteristics have benefited you during these times, keep reading – this might give you a new perspective as to how they can going forward.

Gentle souls’ highly sensitive nature can make them prone to mental health issues. I personally have a major anxiety disorder, and if my anxiety gets too severe, bam! Depression hits. You’d think that extraordinary stressors, like those that arise in extraordinary times, would make me worse. But in fact, the opposite is true. I’ve noticed throughout my life that I actually feel less anxiety when life is out of the ordinary, like when I’m traveling overseas. Ordinary life stuff, like going to the grocery store, stresses me to the max, but nothing calms me down like going to another country where I know no one and don’t speak the language. Weird, right?

Here’s what I think: as an HSP (highly sensitive person), I’m extremely sensitive to small stressors, and in ordinary situations, these stand out a lot, like tacks on an otherwise smooth track. But in novel situations where everything is a small stressor, in order to psychologically survive I have to rise above all of it. It’s almost like I enter a Zen calm, in which I can respond to my environment in a state of composed, alert presence. Seriously, I’m someone you want around in a crisis – just don’t ask me to get you groceries haha. A possible theory as to why this happens is this: because I have to manage so many stressors in normal daily life because of my high sensitivity, when a crisis occurs I can marshal that skillset and wield it very effectively.

Another trait that can make gentle souls seem less adaptive is our tendency to dislike competitive, conflictual interactions. Much of our understanding of human nature has its origins in evolutionary biology, in which the dominant theory is survival of the fittest, and our systems are set up to capitalize on this. It’s obvious that gentle souls are not adapted to this type of game. We simply aren’t, there’s really no question about it. But what if evolutionary biology was wrong about that whole survival of the fittest thing? More recent studies have shown that nature is in fact overwhelmingly cooperative. Competition is actually highly destructive, and this has been borne out in studies of the human realm as well (for example, see Kohn’s The Case Against Competition). What many people are really communicating when they say they like competition is that they like winning. Being an aggressive competitor may help you win, but it’s not an adaptive trait. It’s not going to help you win friends and influence people, in other words.

Gentle souls may not be adaptive in highly competitive environments, but the skills we possess, like cooperative spirit, a desire for kindness, and a capacity for empathy, make us very adaptive in general. And during tumultuous times, these are exactly the skills that are needed. So let’s not be shy about them. Being sensitive, kind, and gentle are awesome things to be right now, and we should be proclaiming that! At the very least, we should be valuing these traits in ourselves at a personal level. And we shouldn’t be afraid to say out loud things like, “I don’t find value in competition,” or “I’m glad I’m an introvert,” or “I think aggressive people bring everyone down,” or “Maybe the problem isn’t that I’m too sensitive, but that you’re not sensitive enough.” Or anything else that flies in the face of the hegemonic conventional thinking about these things. The way we can bring value to the world by valuing ourselves, so let’s do it.

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.

Creativity Is the Antidote to Burnout: A Creative’s Manifesto for 2021

We don’t need anyone’s permission to be creative.

I coach clients who can’t seem to connect with their creative potential, often because of burnout. They know they’re creative people, or think they could be, or maybe they were one in their past life, but for some reason their creativity engine is broken. They feel called to create, but can’t make it happen. And it feels awful. It’s like having a terrible itch under your skin you can’t scratch – or worse. Creativity is an essential need of every human being, whether we recognize it or not, and without it our lives cease to be as meaningful. And for some of us, creativity is one of our primary needs. Burnout is an emergency for creatives, because when we lose our ability to be creative, our purpose in this world is gone. Life becomes like a living death.    

But when we try to seek out help, we run into a big problem. Most of the info out there on burnout is useless for creatives. It’s surface-level and it’s mostly saying the same thing. We live in a world of copious information that is all essentially a copy of itself, replicated over and over in the digital dimension through articles, blog posts, videos… Our info reservoir is cluttered with crap. This was my problem when I started looking for help with my own burnout. None of the available information resonated with me. It was all just more of the same. Please just stop with the four things I can do to cure my burnout! That stuff doesn’t work, at least it didn’t for me. The reason is that we don’t understand what burnout is. Not really.       

In its most severe form, burnout is the death of our creative capacities. And for creatives, it is often the result of years of living out of touch with our creative center – as we are required to do in order to “succeed” in conventional ways. So burnout, in creatives, is both caused by, and causes, this loss of ability to be creative. Note that I am not talking about what is typically labeled “creative burnout” here. Creative burnout is a type of fatigue that results from overwork in the creative realm, and taking a break to recharge can help. The kind of burnout I’m talking about results from a disconnection from the creative self; it happens when we have not allowed ourselves to live creativity-centered lives.

This kind of burnout is a whole-life phenomenon, and that’s why it can’t be solved in the way advised in all those burnout resources. You can’t just take up watercoloring and hope that it will fix your existential problem. Before you develop a specific creative practice, you have to open your life up to creativity – fit a creativity lens over your perspective, if you will. A solution to whole-life burnout is a whole-life creativity. What creativity is, at its core, is a type of problem solving. It’s figuring out how to do the stuff of your life in a way that suits you and inspires you. At an intellectual level, it’s figuring out answers to what puzzles you and arouses your curiosity. Creativity as a lifestyle is adaptive, responsive, and open-ended. It’s a way of being in the world.

You can’t develop a satisfying creative practice from the outside in. Without a connection to your creative source, that creative engine at the center of your existence, you will only ever be playing in the shallows of your creative potential. I wrote for years this way, and I turned out some good stuff I’m proud of, but it wasn’t a fulfilling practice. It wasn’t until I developed a sense of myself as a creative being, rather than just someone who does creative stuff sometimes, that I began to feel like I was tapping into my potential. I went from struggling to come up with a single creative idea to finding creative possibility everywhere, all the time, as if creativity is part of the very fabric of the universe. And it is – at the quantum level, our universe is one of infinite potentiality.

So let’s make this new year, 2021, one of tapping that creative potential. We can start by accepting that we have a right to be creative, not just in some things, but in all things. And by acknowledging that we aren’t just people who do creative things – we’re creative beings from the inside out. And finally, by respecting our own creative natures through internalizing the fundamental truth that we don’t need the permission of anyone outside of ourselves to be creative. We already have permission. We just need to open our eyes to it. We are creatives if we decide we are.

So go do it!