By the Seat of Your Pants: Secrets of Discovery Writing
By KimBoo York
()
About this ebook
By the Seat of Your Pants: Secrets of Discovery Writing delves into the uncharted waters of a writing technique often shrouded in mystery and skepticism.
Written by a seasoned author who's embraced the art of discovery writing (writing without a predefined outline), it offers a fresh perspective on a method that many conventional schools of thought tend to overlook or outright dismiss. This book challenges the norm, encouraging writers to explore the untapped potential of discovery writing.
At its core, By the Seat of Your Pants is a celebration of storytelling in its most organic form. It demystifies the concept of discovery writing, illustrating how some of the most engaging and captivating narratives are born from spontaneity and intuition, and offers guidance to those looking to explore discovery writing techniques. More than just a craft guide, it's an affirmation for every writer who has ever felt constrained by the rigid frameworks of traditional writing methods.
The book opens with a candid look at KimBoo's journey through the various phases of learning and then unlearning everything she was taught about outlining and planning a story. Her experience was not just about writing, but about breaking free from the shackles of conventional writing methodologies. KimBoo shares personal anecdotes and experiences, shedding light on the challenges and triumphs of embracing a pantser's approach.
Common misconceptions about discovery writing are addressed and answered, encouraging writers to trust in their storytelling abilities, even when they deviate from the conventional path.
Moreover, this book is a call to the writing community to broaden its perspective on what constitutes 'real' writing. It challenges the stigma often associated with non-traditional writing methods, particularly discovery writing, and advocates for a more inclusive understanding of different creative processes. KimBoo's life-long experiences with fanfiction, genre writing, and her persistent use of discovery writing are highlighted as examples of the diverse and rich tapestry of the literary world.
By the Seat of Your Pants is a book that validates the experiences of countless writers who have felt marginalized or misunderstood. It's a beacon for those who yearn to write freely, without the constraints of strict, inhibiting structures. The book serves as a starting point for a broader conversation about the legitimacy and effectiveness of various writing techniques.
In the end, KimBoo York has written a book which stands as a powerful reminder that the journey of writing is as unique as the story being told. It's an invitation to embrace your individuality as a writer, to find joy in the unexpected, and to discover the stories that lie waiting in the unexplored territories of your imagination.
By the Seat of Your Pants: Secrets of Discovery Writing is more than a book; it's a movement, and a declaration of independence for writers everywhere.
Join the revolution of discovery writers and embark on a journey of creative liberation and storytelling without boundaries.
KimBoo York
KimBoo York is a multi-genre writer with more imagination than brains. She's also kind of grumpy and mostly enjoys the company of her dog, Keely, who is perfect and beyond reproach in every way.
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By the Seat of Your Pants - KimBoo York
Understanding Discovery Writing
Introduction: Wait, what?
A friend asked me to teach them how to be a pantser.
Unthinkingly, I said sure!
I figured it would be a very simple thing for me to do, because all you have to do to be a pantser is this: feel the fear and do it anyway.
However, I quickly realized that answer isn't as helpful as we would all like it to be. So, this book is my attempt to give a bit of actual, useful advice on how to be a pantser...or, more accurately, how to be a discovery writer.
To be honest, I'm not sure why someone would want to be a discovery writer. I certainly did not want to be one! That is why it has taken me so long to accept the fact that I am what is so derogatorily referred to as a pantser. I was told for years—decades—that being a pantser is a recipe for failure. No self-respecting professional author is a pantser!
But then I wonder how much time I would not have wasted second-guessing myself if a book like this had been available when I was younger…
(My friend eventually explained his reasons, and they are good ones! I talk about those reasons in the What’s Holding You Back? section!)
Perhaps some people are attracted to the concept of discovery writing because they have heard that it might help them increase their daily output of words? That's possible, but in my experience, it all comes out in the wash (unless you're Dean Wesley Smith, who we will talk about later).
Maybe someone is genuinely, inherently a discovery writer, but they stifled that impulse out of fear. I suspect a lot of innate discovery writers go through that phase, because all the advice to novice writers is to start with an outline. I can't tell you how many articles and books I've looked at over the years that profess being specifically for discovery writers, but at some point or another fall back on the tired advice start with an outline.
I wasted years of my writing life trying to force myself to "outline then write" and feeling like a failure because that never got me anywhere.
It’s easy to become demoralized by the steady beat of experts telling you that you are doing it all wrong even though you suspect deep in your heart that you are, in fact, doing it the right way for you!
The few professional authors who own up to being discovery writers tend to be downplayed quite a bit or dismissed as outliers. And indeed, they are outliers. That's very true.
But not because there aren't a lot of people who, by nature, use discovery writing, but because discovery writers are reminiscent of students who were left-handed one-hundred years ago: it's been trained out of them. Sometimes, brutally.
My mother was one of those people. She had an affinity for being left-handed, which was trained out of her at a very young age. She remembered the suffering she went through as a child, and it infuriated her to her dying day. Admittedly, her handwriting was gorgeous, and she had no problems being a right-handed person overall. The adults in her life did a good job of torturing the left-handedness out of her, I suppose.
But if there was one thing Mother could do best, it was hold a grudge. When she carried me around as an infant, she purposefully shifted me back and forth in her arms so that both my hands had an equal opportunity to become dominant.
And that's how I ended up being left-handed.
Part of that story, of course, is that society changed around my mother as time went on. She still got some criticism from family and teachers for allowing
me to be left-handed, but generally it was far more acceptable in the 1970s than it had been in the 1940s.
The result was that as left-handedness became more socially acceptable and permitted by the education system, the number of left-handed people spiked. But more left-handed people hadn’t been born. The fact is that roughly 10% of humans are left-handed. Here’s the kicker: it has always been true that 10% of humans were always left-handed.
The spike in numbers in the 1970s was because people who were naturally left-handed were allowed to be left-handed. Adults who suffered from being forced to treat their right hand as their dominant hand, finally—unlike my mother—switched back to using the dominant hand that came naturally to them. Children like me were allowed to use our naturally dominant hand from the start.
The world changed slowly but irrevocably around left-handed people, but we were always a part of it.
I feel it's probably going to be similar for discovery writers over the next few years.
More and more people will accept that being a discovery writer is not only permissible but a great way to write a book or serial or anything at all. Many more will finally start talking openly about how discovery writing is a critical tool in their writing techniques arsenal.
And some who had their pantser
ways brutally beaten out of them (figuratively, I hope) might realize that they can learn and use discovery writing techniques that feel more organically creative to them than outlining and planning ever did!
However, for the moment, discovery writing is largely overlooked as a valid technique to teach writers. Additionally, because there are so many different ways to practice discovery writing, teaching it is difficult, even for those who want to cover it in classes.
Since outlining techniques are fairly uniform (if different in structure), it’s possible to consistently teach those techniques to writers. That is not to say all planners plot the same way since most develop their own habits and techniques as they gain experience; however, if your advice is to always start with an outline, then you can successfully teach a wide variety of people by having them all start with an outline—any outline will do!
Compared to training somebody to be an outliner/plotter, established methodologies for discovery writing are thin on the ground, which is why few instruction manuals for it exist. But fortunately, they are not difficult to learn once you know they exist.
This is how we’ve ended up with so many schools of outlining/beats: different writers created their own versions of outlines/beats and then started teaching their process to others. Too often they claim theirs is the One True Way, which is not true at all, but the thing they all agree on is that some form of pre-plotting is not just important, but required.
And, well, to be honest? Yes, outlines are necessary more often than not.
But wait! There’s more!
The reason I can say outlines are necessary
is because my primary assertion is that while discovery writers and plotters share a process, they do it in opposite directions. I believe discovery writing can be taught (and more importantly, learned) because there is structure in them-there-hills. It’s just not the droids you are looking for.
Generally, discovery writers organize on the back end, instead of on the front end the way plotters do. They may not need to do much organization at all if they are experienced writers with a strong intuition cultivated by a deep knowledge of storytelling (more on that in Intuition and You). Such authors mentally structure their story as they discover the plot and character arc(s).
No matter what approach to discovery writing you use, at some point deep in the process there is always a bit of reflexive review to tighten up the story. This can happen either when you’ve got a completed draft, or when it has become too unwieldy to simply keep bashing out words (and we’ll be talking about both later!).
Obviously, being a discovery writer of shorter works can be a little bit easier, because you write it and then you finagle it into its final form in a shorter time span and with more intense focus. Longer works can be a lot more difficult, though.
If it’s so difficult, I hear all you critics out there saying, why not just outline from the beginning? Because no matter how hard it is to organize a story in the later stages of the process, that is still easier than trying to organize a story that never actually gets written. That is, if the writing instruction doesn’t meet writers at the place where their creativity lives, then they will simply never write anything.
Let me be clear to students and teachers of writing both: crushing a writer’s motivation and inspiration to write because it doesn’t conform to an abstract ideal of normal
and/or acceptable
is a terrible thing to do. Too often, it leads to people abandoning creative writing altogether. That, in my not-so-humble opinion, is criminally negligent.
The alternative is to let writers lean into their strengths, whether that is pre-planning using outlines, character profiles etc., or discovery writing, or a mix of techniques.
Teaching writers how to use the principles of discovery writing requires teaching them the best way to connect with their intuition by breaking through their Resistance/inspiring their Muse first and only falling back on outlining/beats later in the process. There are ways to do that, and more than one way to incorporate discovery writing into your practice.
Unfortunately, the common (only?) advice given to people who are committed discovery writers is to just write without stopping.
This is as helpful as telling us to write an outline first, and just as insidious. Dean Wesley Smith calls it ‘writing into the dark’ and it is a powerful way to write…but it’s not easy.
Start at the beginning and keep going until you get to the end
works well for those who have enough writing experience and have honed their intuition for years, but they are few and far between. Trying to do that particular