On Discovery Writing and a Shocking Reveal About One of Eight's Most Beloved Characters

I'll preface this post by saying that there are as many ways of writing as there are writers, and the following is what works for me at this point in time. Also, please note that there are mild spoilers for Eight books 1 and 2. 

I’m a discovery writer, which means that while I may have the seed of an idea when I begin writing a story, I won’t know how events will play out until the story’s events have been written. My job, essentially, is to set things in motion and then get out of the way—to record events as they unfold as faithfully as possible. 

There are writers who meticulously plot their novels in advance, but whenever I’ve tried it in the past, my engagement with the story seed lessens, my curiosity falters, and my motivation languishes. The process of writing becomes rote, and more importantly, the story itself becomes smaller, limited by the scope of my cleverness. 

The reality is that my conscious, planning mind will never make the kinds of creative leaps that my subconscious can—to bring forth the kinds of things that help a story to breathe, to become textured, and to leave the bounds of the ordinary. My subconscious mind is so much better at pulling out interesting, stray details and then connecting them to what would otherwise appear unconnected. 

All that depends, though, on making room for it. If my conscious mind is full of ideas and plans, then where is the subconscious to go? If I’m lucky, it’ll sneak interesting tidbits between the cracks. If I’m unlucky, nowhere. That’s why I have to approach any story without too many overt plans, because if I’m already holding onto something, my capacity to pick up anything new is diminished. 

That’s not to say that writers who plot in advance can’t do the same. I’m sure many have. I just can’t, as there’s something about the planning process that concretizes the story for me. It becomes rigid once documented, and I have a much harder time being nimble when the characters want to travel in directions different than I’ve planned.  

Fortunately, I’m not completely sea while discovery writing. I know stories well enough to be able to look ahead and foresee at what’s coming. As such, there’s an informal list in my head of milestones, plot points, and background information that I’ve pick up along the way while traveling in the direction the story set out for me. 

And if I find myself stuck or suffering from writer’s block? In my case, that usually means I’ve gone the wrong way, and need to backtrack until I find the correct way forward. I’ve gotten pretty good at recognizing the signs too. There’s no longer the need for me to rewrite entire chapters. Novels too, but that’s a long painful story, which I may tell another day. 

So, I have a rough map in my head while writing, ephemeral but grounded in what I’ve learned of the story, and yet even so, the characters still sometimes surprise me by choosing to do the unexpected. Or they run into the unexpected—a shocking development that completely changes the story’s arc. Like, for example, Yuki. 

When I started writing Eight, I had a bunch of questions in the back of my head about what it took to survive in an isekai scenario. I wondered at how often stories fast-forwarded through the early transition to the new world they were introducing and what a fuller view of that time might look like. 

There were a lot of ideas stewing in my head, but none of them involved an intelligent lichen. I literally had no clue until Yuki’s and Eight’s first meeting—a major character with far-reaching impact on the whole series was discovered by me about two-thirds of the way writing the first novel. 

And what’s most interesting is that Yuki is a character I couldn’t have planned. They existed in a place my planning wouldn’t have been able to reach. It took approaching the story empty handed, with as few preconceived ideas as possible, to find and make room for them. 

As a result, the story became richer, at least for me. Some people were turned off by our little pink friend, but the role Yuki plays in the story is... well, it’s foundational, and now I couldn’t imagine Eight without them.