Plotting and Discovery Writing — How to Use the Best of Both Worlds for Yourself

This is how you combine the advantages of plotting with the spontaneity of discovery writing

I have written most of my 28 novels so far as a pantser.

At first, I tried to plot as the successful and experienced authors always recommend, but it didn’t work for me.

I couldn’t get any further with my stories because I couldn’t develop a vision of what the story as a whole would look like.

So I started writing without a plan and realized that this seemed to be exactly my thing.

The words just flowed out of the keyboard and while I was still typing, a continuous film formed inside my head.

The writing process brought the characters to life in my mind’s eye, which never happened when I was planning.

Instead of developing the skeleton of the story and gradually adding meat, the whole thing grew organically. Bones, skin, and hair appeared at the same time.

Now I knew that I was a pantser.

At least that’s what I thought.

But then came the days when I had to edit my finished stories. And it made me sick.

Because every time I discovered substantial plot holes, connection errors, inconsistencies, and other content errors that made it necessary to rewrite entire chapters.

The reason for this was quickly apparent to me. I wrote without a plan, and therefore, it was difficult for me to keep track of what I had already written.

Who was when where and since when did the villain carry the weapon? All questions I could only answer by scrolling back dozens or hundreds of pages (I used to write my books in MS Word).

In short, the effort was immense and frustrating. Besides, I was always afraid not to find all the logic gaps.

I desperately needed a different approach to my story writing.

I decided I had to become a plotter

Maybe I got it wrong at the beginning of my writing career. Meanwhile, I was much more experienced and had already written more than a dozen books. Surely now I was ready to plot a story from front to back and avoid all the mistakes that Discovery Writing had brought with it.

But far from it.

Already the first attempt was precisely the same as the first time I tried it.

I plotted eight or nine scenes and then ran into a wall. The further I got, the more the story got lost in the fog.

Now I sat there and didn’t know what to do. Should I return to my old way of working, which worked but drove me crazy?

It couldn’t be that.

So that day I closed my laptop and decided to sleep over it for one night. Maybe my subconscious would help me out.

The flood of pictures came before falling asleep

In bed, my thoughts kept returning to the scenes I had already plotted. But if you now think that I suddenly magically knew how the story had to go on, I have to disappoint you.

But something else happened: as I kept going through the scenes, they suddenly became more alive and more detailed.

Entire dialogues developed in my head and the surroundings took shape.

I felt a strong urge to stand up and sit at the computer.

All advisors always tell you to write down every idea immediately. Otherwise, it might be lost forever.

But I knew it would still be there the next day. The scenes were so vivid and impressive that I would certainly not forget them in my sleep.

The best of both worlds

It was all there when I returned to my story the next morning after breakfast.

That day I wrote a little over 5000 words in just four hours. When I got up and left work, I had finished six of my twelve scenes.

I repeated the same the next day. Within only two days, I had written over 10,000 words. I was overwhelmed.

But the best thing came the next day: I suddenly knew how my story had to evolve. So I plotted the following five scenes.

Of course, I ran against the wall again this time and couldn’t look any further into the future of the story. But that didn’t bother me anymore. I now knew that it would go on as soon as I had finished writing my new plotted scenes.

And so it happened. Since that day I have been writing all my books this way. I plot some scenes, let the whole thing rest for one night, then write the scenes down the next day in full length and then plot the next scenes until I run out of ideas again.

Conclusion

So I combine plotting with discovery writing. I always know where the scene I’m writing leads to, but I see the end of the whole story very late in the writing process.

I’m sure that a lot of you will do the same and would be happy to hear if I’m right.

For those of you who have a hard time plotting, I hope to have shown you a possible way out of this creative hole.

Try this method, and you will see that your subconscious sometimes only needs a little push to get up to speed.

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