When I first came across the term discovery writer, it didn’t particularly resonate with me.
I don’t start with a blank page and see where the story takes me. I start with an outline.
That doesn’t mean I know everything before I begin, of course. My outlines can contain gaps, questions, alternatives and notes like maybe this or not sure what happens here. But to me, outlining and drafting are still fundamentally different activities.
The outline is the skeleton. The draft is the thing that is supposed to become the actual story.
So I have always thought of myself as an outliner rather than a discovery writer.
Recently, though, I went back through the development documents for one of my current novels. I was trying to trace how the story had evolved from its earliest conception through character work and several outlines.
And I realised something.
I may not discover my novels through drafting.
But that doesn’t mean I don’t discover them.
The discovery just happens inside the outline.
A story doesn’t necessarily begin with the first document
The novel in question is about two twin sisters with a telepathic connection. One sister, Chi, is abducted. The other, Lan, tries to find her.
The basic premise came first. I hadn’t written it down yet but it was already percolating in my mind.
Then I happened to take part in the TTRPG-based character creation challenge. I used this story idea as inspiration and created Fate character sheets for Chi and Lan.
After that, I filled out character questionnaires for both of them.
Only later did I create what I think of as the first actual story-development document: a Sketchbook where I started asking questions about the premise and the possible shape of the novel.
Looking back, that sequence is interesting to me because the characters did not emerge after the premise, fully formed by the outline. The premise and characters were already interacting before I had properly begun outlining the novel.
The story existed.
I just didn’t yet know how all of it worked.
The characters were more stable than I expected
One of the things that surprised me most when comparing the documents was Chi.
The character questionnaires are something like a character grid for me. I fill them out, and then I mostly forget about them. I don’t consciously sit there with the questionnaire beside me while outlining and ask myself what answer to Question 37 means for Chapter 12.
And yet, when I looked back, Chi had remained fundamentally herself.
She was impulsive. She was impatient. She was interested in lockpicking and snooping. She wanted freedom. She disliked rules and restrictions. She was not naturally a careful planner.
Those things continued to shape the story.
Chi’s captivity and escape plot changed and became more complicated but Chi herself did not seem to require major reinvention.
Lan was different.
Her personality was there fairly early too. She was patient, dutiful and thoughtful. She had an information network. She thought before acting. Chi was one of her greatest weaknesses.
But there was a problem.
What was Lan actually doing in this novel?
It turned out that discovering who Lan was and discovering what kind of story she could carry were two different things.
The outline started revealing its own problems
At one point, I had Chi and Lan alternating as POV characters.
That made perfect sense in the context in which the outline had developed. I had originally conceived of Chi and Lan as two PCs in a Fate campaign in order to create a Fate outline for the novel. Two characters meant two active strands of play.
But this did not make sense for a novel. Eventually I realised that alternating between them every chapter wasn’t really a narrative decision. It was a Fate artefact.
So I changed the structure. Instead of mechanically moving between Chi and Lan every chapter, I started thinking about allowing the reader to remain with one sister for a meaningful stretch before moving to the other.
That was one discovery.
But the larger problem was Lan herself.
Chi had immediate forward momentum. She had been abducted. She was trapped. She wanted to escape. She could observe her surroundings, make plans, recruit other prisoners and deal with the consequences when things went wrong.
Lan, meanwhile, was outside.
Initially, she risked becoming the person investigating while Chi had the actual story.
So the question wasn’t really: What subplot can I give Lan?
It was: Why does Lan need to have a POV at all?
And that question changed the novel.
Lan’s role didn’t appear all at once
Looking back, I can see several stages in how Lan’s role crystallised.
First, she became the external counterpart to Chi.
Chi was trying to escape from inside. Lan was trying to find and help her from outside.
But that still wasn’t quite enough.
Then I realised that Lan could represent the external consequences of Chi’s kidnapping. The kidnapping was not something happening in an isolated prison space while the rest of the world waited for Chi to escape. It affected her family, relationships and the social structures around her.
Lan became the person moving through those consequences.
Then came the more important realisation.
The two sisters’ plots should not simply run alongside each other until one of them finally reached the other.
They needed to converge.
The eventual reunion should require both sisters.
Chi needed to do what Lan could not do from outside. Lan needed to do what Chi could not do from captivity.
The telepathic connection had been part of the premise from the beginning, largely as a plot device. But the development of the two sisters’ separate roles eventually gave that connection a larger structural function.
It could become part of how their two stories actually came together.
That, to me, was a much more significant discovery than simply giving Lan more chapters.
The outline didn’t give me answers. It gave me better questions.
I think this may be the part that changed how I think about my own outlining.
I don’t use an outline because I have already solved the novel.
Quite often, the opposite happens.
I put the story into a structure and the structure starts showing me what I haven’t solved yet.
Lan doesn’t have enough of a role.
The middle is losing momentum.
Chi’s first escape plan has failed. What does that actually change?
The sisters are pursuing the same ultimate goal, but why do they both need to be there at the end?
An information source is unreliable. How does Lan respond to that?
The answer to one question creates the next problem.
Chi tries to organise the prisoners into an escape plan.
Someone betrays her.
The betrayal changes how she sees the other prisoners.
That creates a new problem: who can she trust?
Meanwhile, Lan loses access to her own information network.
She has to rely on someone else’s.
That information may itself be compromised.
So she needs ways to verify it.
I don’t think I sat down and said, I should now add an information-verification subplot because that would make Lan’s character arc more distinctive.
The story had reached a point where the existing solution was no longer reliable.
So another solution had to emerge.
Structural pressure seems to be where I discover things
Looking across the documents, I don’t think my process is one of open-ended invention.
I seem to make discoveries when something starts pressing against the existing structure.
There is a gap.
A character doesn’t have enough to do.
An event doesn’t generate sufficient consequences.
A plotline is running parallel to another without a reason to converge.
A structure inherited from an earlier form—such as a Fate campaign—doesn’t actually belong to the novel.
And then I start asking questions.
Not necessarily: What could happen?
But often: What does this story need here?
That distinction feels important to me.
Because I don’t need unlimited possibilities in order to work.
Sometimes the constraint is exactly what makes the next possibility appear.
I can also leave things unsolved
My outlines are full of things I don’t know yet.
Sometimes I leave a placeholder and move on.
Sometimes the answer appears the next day. Sometimes it takes longer.
I don’t need to solve every chapter before I can continue developing another part of the story.
But I have also noticed that there is a difference between an unresolved question sitting inside an otherwise functioning structure and an unresolved question sitting right at the forward edge of the story.
The first one can often wait.
The second one can stop me.
If I have:
A character investigates something → finds something odd → asks what it means
I usually have somewhere to go.
But if I have:
A character starts investigating something → and nothing follows
I can become temporarily blocked.
The chapter has an activity, but not yet forward momentum.
That may be why outlining is so useful for me. It lets me see these gaps before I am trying to turn them into prose.
So where does discovery happen?
I still don’t think of myself as a discovery writer in the usual sense.
I don’t discover my novels by drafting from a blank page and following the characters wherever they lead.
But looking back at the development of this novel, I also don’t think I can honestly say that I simply plan everything in advance and then execute the plan.
The story changes because the outline reveals problems.
Those problems create questions.
The questions force me to think about character, causality, structure and function.
Sometimes the answer changes a chapter.
Sometimes it changes an entire plotline.
Sometimes it changes the way I am organising the novel itself.
So perhaps my process is something like this:
Premise → characters → outline → structural pressure → questions → discovery → revised outline.
And then the process repeats.
I don’t use outlining to eliminate uncertainty.
I use outlining to discover which uncertainties matter.
