Discovery Writing: Advantages and Disadvantages
When planning out a story, there are two approaches: discovery and outlining. Discovery is making up the story as you go, whereas outlining involves creating an outline for the story. Each one has advantages and disadvantages. As always, I’m only going to scratch the surface a little, this week with discovery writing, next week with outlining.
I’ve found discovery writing to be helpful when writing because I come up with ideas while writing that I didn’t while outlining. The biggest one I can think of was in Cherry Champion. After Hermione followed Rose’s example and ran in to try to stop the Death Eaters at the World Cup, she became traumatized. My idea was that it would come up throughout her year at Hogwarts, but I couldn’t figure out where to begin. After being stuck on that for nearly a month, I started writing the next chapter, making it up as I went. I started with her parents’ reaction to it, and soon realized there was no way they were about to let her return to Hogwarts. That shaped the rest of the story in a way I never thought about until I’d written it.
The biggest disadvantage of discovery writing is that it requires going back to fix it once you’ve written it. While this is typical of second and third passes, it happens a lot more with discovery writing. The pieces written at different times might not always fit together, because there’s no guiding outline to keep them consistent. Thus, entire chapters might have to be changed to keep it consistent. This isn’t as big a deal when writing a novel; it’s expected to rewrite it several times. But without an outline to look at and see problems beforehand, more time might be spent rewriting than would otherwise.
These are just some of the advantages and disadvantages of discovery writing that I’ve found while writing. Other writers will share different experiences. I tend toward discovery writing because if I focus too much on fleshing out an outline, I get stuck and can’t write. With the exception of year one, all of Girl in Red has an outline, but those outlines weren’t always followed. I’ll talk more about the advantages and disadvantages of outlining next week.
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