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.
Behind the Scenes: Portland in Eight
A reader once complained to me about Ollie’s affection for Portland. At the time, they were reading the first draft of Eight, and felt that his reminisces about the city were distracting from the story. Ollie was in a new world, after all. The focus should’ve been there, right?
Well, yes, but the new world also needed a counterweight—something to help contrast between Ollie’s experiences before and after his arrival—and that was the role Portland played.
The honor certainly wasn’t going to go to Ollie’s first family. They were a mess, no matter how much he cared for his grandparents. The family was dysfunctional at best, and his experiences in Sherwood weren’t any better. The wooded areas around his family home were important to his development into the man he’d eventually become, but the actual town and its people, not so much.
No, the story demanded that Ollie have a place he could call home and where he could find happiness, otherwise there’d be no sense of loss upon his arrival. His life in Sherwood sure wouldn’t cut it, which is how Portland came into the picture. It was where he met Helen and where he raised his kids.
In the same way Sherwood conflated with Ollie’s first family, Portland conflated with his second. He could’ve potentially moved away from Oregon entirely to find his happiness elsewhere, but I didn’t want to complicate his background by introducing an exodus to some other setting. Besides, Portland’s weirdness lended itself to the darker, more mystical aspects of Ollie’s background.
As an aside, after writing the scene in Eight about the Midnight Man, I was dogged for months by the desire to write a series of ‘Weird Portland’ short stories featuring Ollie’s family going around town solving mysteries like Scooby Doo and the gang. If only my writing time weren’t so limited, I might’ve done it.
Anyway, if you’ve seen maps of Portland, you know the city has a number of bridges connecting its west and east sides. That was the role I envisioned the city playing in the book—a bridge between Ollie’s early life and his new life. A place where he could plant roots, so that they could more clearly be torn out when he arrived in the new world.
It also didn’t hurt that I’d lived in Portland, and knew the city well enough to be able to describe it decently well.
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I recently just came back from visiting, and it was clear that the last few years have been hard on Portland. I still saw a fair share of characters walking the streets, and kindness too, but also many more store fronts for lease than I’d ever seen before. For nostalgia’s sake, I stopped by an old place of employment, and the building was empty and for lease.
While I was there, I also grabbed a bunch of shots of street and found art. It’s something I do whenever traveling.
If you’d like to see more from Portland, as well other places I’ve visited, check out my Instagram page.
P.S. Sherwood is a real place, just like Portland, and the folks I’ve met from there have been great. Don’t forget that Eight is a work of fiction.
5 Things I Learned When Editing 2 Books in 12 Months
The scene: I’d written two serialized books that’d been posted to Royal Road, and I wanted to get them ready for Kindle and Kindle Unlimited. Like, really ready, so I hired a professional editor.
Cue the editor: Specifically, I reached out to JD Book Services for three rounds of edits on Eight (developmental, line, and copy) and two for the sequel (line and copy).
What followed: a year of slogging through the editor’s comments, during which I frequently questioned my sanity for wanting to write, but from which I eventually emerged as a better writer. Plus, the books were much tighter and more coherent thanks to the time invested.
Cutting to the chase, here’s what I learned:
1. How to properly use a gods-be-damned semicolon. Before, I’d treated it as a super-powered comma, but that’s not a semicolon’s purpose; its job is to separate two independent clauses. If one of the clauses can’t stand alone, then it needs either a comma or an em dash. Unfortunately, I’d littered my novels with semicolons before I learned that lesson.
2. That writing serially introduces certain artifacts, which can be exacerbated if there are long periods of time in between posts. For me, I post a chapter a week on Royal Road, which may not sound like a long time, but depending on the length of a book, months might pass before a thing mentioned in chapter X is referenced again in chapter Z. That necessitates reminders that sound a lot like the author repeating themselves constantly when read non-serially.
3. To watch out for unintentional rhymes. They’re not a problem when reading, but can be distracting when the story is translated into an audiobook.
4. Record keeping for stats and character progression has to be immaculate, so that if there are edits, you can keep it all straight and not introduce any errors when making adjustments. That went double for silverlight gains, the equivalent of experience points in my books.
5. To let scenes breathe and to take the time necessary to flesh them out. This lesson was a hard one for me, and the editor pointed it out over and over in the text how I had a tendency to drop a big thought and then move on. It was like I wanted to prove I was a clever writer, but didn’t have the discipline to demonstrate I was a hard-working one too.
To put it more bluntly: any stray ideas or observations that weren’t worth taking the time to fully integrate, those were distractions from the story’s flow and had to be cut. And, as the edits proceeded and the story grew stronger as a result, I learned that this way of building up scenes also enhanced the feeling of authenticity arising from them. They were so much better than before, and it became clear that if there was a choice needed between the two, authenticity beat cleverness every time.
So, those are five things I learned when editing two books in twelve months. There’s more beyond them, but I’ve gone long enough. I hope you find these observations interesting or helpful in your own work.
Please note: No editors were harmed in the making of this post, which was probably a mistake. It means that I am solely to blame for any errors, grammatical or otherwise.