 
 
I’m going to forgo the prompt today but I am going to talk a little bit about an aspect of my writing process that has taken me some time to embrace. It has to do with discovery writing.
Discovery writing is when you start writing your story and “discover” where it goes. People often refer to this as “pantsing.”
Now, I am most certainly an outliner or a “plotter,” and a rather meticulous one, at that. But through writing books and short stories over the last decade, I have come to realize that I am also a discovery writer as well. That realization led me to further conclude that maybe pantsing and plotting are really two sides of the same writing coin.
I’ll illustrate the point. In my short romance, “Mar y Sol” (currently out of print but I will be putting it up for sale for the summer of 2022), I had a solid outline, including the tropes, central romance, characters and plot beats. However, it took me 30 pages to get into a story that would, in its final version, come in at about 15K words. That’s at least 10K words of “aimless” writing. Luckily, I have a wonderful editor friend, at Gray Plume Editorial Services who I contract to professionally edit all my self-published work, who figured me out right away after editing several short romances and informed me that I was, in fact a discovery writer. In other words, even with a detailed outline in hand, I had to “write my way” into the story and when I finally arrived at a point, my story would officially “begin.” Thirty pages. As long as the story itself.
I’ve learned to embrace this quirk of writing, this thinking on paper that takes place before I can go anywhere with my story. I go through the same process with my characters; when I can’t figure out what their goals or motivations are, I write about them, put them in situations, build backstories, anecdotes, even character interviews until I figure them out. Using character tropes and archetypes help to get the broad strokes of their personality, but it’s only through extensive exploration that I come to understand who they are.
There are many ways to accomplish these objectives that don’t involve so much writing, and there are as many ways to build a story as there are authors to write them. But I’ve found that this sort of aimless writing helps me understand, not only my story, but also the characters and sometimes, when journaling or free writing, even myself.
So when I am asked if I am a panster or a plotter, I tell people I’m a little bit of both. And that’s probably true of almost everyone.
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For more about the #100daysofwriting challenge, check out https://www.tumblr.com/tagged/100daysofwriting to see all the posts for each day. Thanks to @the-wip-project for organizing this fascinating challenge!If you get stumped on what to write, check the #100daysofquestions for prompts to help you write.