037 Plotting While Discovering

Published: Sept. 3, 2019, 12:35 p.m.

The guys discuss their plans for getting back to their stories after some time away. Both of them intend to zoom out a bit and use their discovery-written chapters as a foundation to plot out the rest of the story in general terms. They plan to keep the outline pretty broad instead of ultra-specific in order to avoid paralyzing themselves with the urge to perfect their plots. They discuss how discovery writing from scratch actually leads to less paralyzation than plotting the story in great detail first. Plotting from a top-down, god-like perspective can lead to the temptation to try and perfect the story before a single word is written (which inevitably leads to do-over-itis) while discovery writing forces you to put words on the page and commit to something.