Lost Time in Discovery Writing

Discovery writing, it's the 'winging it' of writing. No outline, no plotting, just a vague idea of a story and a lot of stream of consciousness. I started out as a discovery writer, racing to my computer when my daydreams lead me to something juicy. Lying down in bed in the middle of the night, imagining what the Witcher would be like if Harry Potter was introduced into the universe. Twenty minutes later: "Hey, that's a story."

This line used to get me off the bed.

There's something magical about it. You have a scene, walking down a post-apocalyptic abandoned KL to get food from what's left of Tesco. You see it in your head and as you write it out, your reality is there. You are a cameraman and/or a witness to what's unfolding. Every emotion and action stirs a reaction out of you. A good joke makes you laugh; a dark hallway makes you nervous. The journey is something so raw waiting to be tempered and refined. If this is relatable, great. If not, maybe it's the ADD.

My problem is that a novel is a lot longer than a short story, it's not simple either. It's a story that came out of a daydream when I was 17. How it looked then is vastly different from how it looks now; how it looks now is vastly different compared to even three years ago. In all drafts, the story never gets done. It's not worth trunking, but it's never complete. This is one of the hardest lessons I've had to sit with. You will get older ergo wiser, your insight on what you can offer to your story will change for the better. However, that is what will keep you stuck.

My protagonist originally started out as a guy who travelled to Japan in a mythological world to study. At the time, I didn't know about anything else other than being a student. Now, my protagonist is a philosophy lecturer in a fictional world based on interviews and casual conversations with lecturers I've grown up with. She used to have the noble motivation of doing her plot device out of a sense of duty, today that duty is a lie she tells herself to keep going. 

The story evolves. And for the better. But it never gets done. As of right now, I feel this aspect is one of the hardest things I've had to give up. I now think about my plot as something which has an expiry date on the side. I don't know if I'm doing the right thing, but I owe it to myself to finish this rendition before this overall idea dies and gets reborn a new... thus beginning the cycle again.

EDIT/UPDATE:

A day later and this article is still replaying in the back of my head, itching to add more substance to it.