Also called Discovery writing, it is an author who writes novels without creating an outline, plot or any other organizational document ahead of time. I am one of them.

Depends on the author. No one will tell you it is the easiest or most organized way to write. It isn’t. For some – like me – it is the only way to write. If that includes you, then yes, it is the best way.

Depends on the author. If your mind is not extremely organized, it is possible to lose track of your plot, run yourself into a dead-end, create writer’s block that you can’t get out of, create fatal story problems that are difficult to fix without rewriting the entire book, get peanut-butter on your chocolate and create significant amounts of additional work. It’s best to have a plan in mind going in, or things can run off the rails quickly.

Because some authors can’t write any other way. Experts on the Internet will repeatedly tell you to always write an outline before writing your book to avoid all those issues. They’re right, but it’s not that easy because it doesn’t work for everyone. I wrote three books – all of which were garbage and will never see the light of day – before trying to write a book using an outline. I wrote the outline for the book and created profiles for every character down to their favorite color and birth dates. Everything was organized. When I started writing the book, I didn’t make it through the first chapter. It felt like writing a term paper, all work, no fun. I never finished that book. Or even the first chapter. It is still the only novel I started without finishing. Some authors can’t write from an outline. It takes all the fun out of a process that is already a lot of work.

For authors who write this way, it is akin to reading a new book. It is an adventure in discovery of its own. The book surprises us as we write it, with the events occurring that we had no idea would happen. Even though we’re writing it, we are also experiencing it for the first time. I lost track of how many scenes showed up on the page that I had never even thought of before.

It is quite possible to do, but expect a significant amount of additional work and rework. Also, since you don’t know what’s coming in the later volumes, you can’t publish anything until you have at least rough drafts of all the books in the series. If you try it, you’ll regret it. If book 5 goes down a rabbit hole you didn’t expect but immediately love, even though it runs contrary to an ongoing plotline in your other four books, you’re stuck. You can’t go back in time and change those four books to match the new, fantastic storyline. You never know when something could come up in the last book that changes plot lines through all of them. And trust me, it happens.

You don’t until you try it, which, of course, is the hard way. If you can write a book using an outline, there isn’t a person out there who will tell you it isn’t easier in every way that matters. If you can’t write that way but still have a burning passion for writing, maybe Discovery writing is for you. I’ll be the first one to tell you it is significantly more work. I have lost track of how many drafts/rewrites I have made of each book in the series. And they’re not short books.

It is a bit of chaos. I begin the book with starting and ending points in mind, then begin writing the story from that starting point while steering events toward the ending point. When I say ending point, I don’t mean an ending action scene, I mean an ending state of being. Bill and Sherry are married. The dog is a world-famous opera star. Whatever. How the dog became that way is part of the discovery.
That being said, it is like I’m an observer in the room as the events play out around me, with me merely documenting what’s happening. That way, the character’s personalities push the events as they happen instead of following some pre-created outline. I am constantly surprised by how the story goes. Does this work for every Discovery writer? Beats me. I doubt it, but I can only tell you my experience.

The courage to forage into the dark unknown with only faith in yourself that you’ll actually find something in there, a total inability to do things the easy way and an outstanding work ethic because you’ll need to do a lot of it. Work, that is, and you’d better like rewriting. That’s what happens when you do things the hard way. For me, the rough draft was always the worst part. I had to force myself every time to sit down and write that first one. Every time. I never wanted to do it. Well, almost never. It doesn’t help that I’m a slow writer. The rewrites, on the other hand, were the fun part for me. That was when I fleshed out the story and made it say what I wanted. I like the tweaking. I might be ideally suited for discovery writing.

It happened, but what happened when I tried to change it was bizarre. It was the only time I would have writer’s block. If I followed the flow in my head, the story came out without any issues. I never had writer’s block until I tried changing that flow. When that happened, I totally lost track of what was going on and couldn’t continue the story. After undoing my change and returning to the original flow, the writer’s block went away. Later on, as I wrote, I found the story I followed instead of the change I tried to make worked far better. Don’t ask me how this worked. It just did.