Writing without a plan

(This post was written and published as an exercise during a meeting of IndieWebClub Bangalore.)

Ever since I was a teenager, I’ve followed the same process for writing pretty much anything:

  1. Decide what I want to write about
  2. Dump all my thoughts about that topic into a new document
  3. Reorganize my braindump into a coherent outline in the form of bullet points, making sure there’s a logical progression of ideas from start to end
  4. Turn the bullet point outline into readable prose
  5. Fix grammar, spelling, style, and tone
  6. Publish

This is how I was taught to write essays at school, and this is the writing process taught by most writing books and workshops. On the surface it looks pretty reasonable: first you collect all the raw material, then you arrange it so that your audience can logically follow the progression of your argument, and finally you flesh out your prose so that your writing is enjoyable and memorable. What’s not to like?

For me personally, this process just does not work for most kinds of writing I’m interested in. Or rather, it works to the extent that it allows me to produce something that looks like writing, but it makes the process of committing words to paper feel robotic and utilitarian. It works on the assumption that all I need to do to produce a piece of good writing is get the facts out of my head and rearrange them to make them palatable to my readers. It ignores that fact that I might not know what I want to say, or that there might not be any real “facts” involved in what I want to write.

I’ve found this process to be perfect for producing technical writing or persuasive articles, but it hasn’t served me well for writing fiction, poetry, song lyrics, or personal essays. That’s because with all these kinds of writing, I don’t always know what to say. In fact, when I’m writing something that could be considered more “creative” than a blog post about JavaScript, I’m often looking to surprise myself. I’m writing not to communicate or persuade using the knowledge I already have in my head, but to allow my subconscious to surprise me by coming up with connections I could never have made by creating a bulleted list of facts.

So, for most of the creative writing I’ve done this year, I’ve followed a different process:

  1. Set a timer for 45 minutes
  2. Open a blank document and start typing
  3. Wrote a good thing? Fix grammar, spelling, style, and tone. Then publish.
  4. Wrote a bad thing? Move document to a Graveyard folder and try again.

I’ve found that this is not an easy process to follow. Writing without the security of a plan or an outline is nerve wracking. It’s a bit like walking on a tightrope. You never know what’s going to happen, you just react to the words you’re typing in real time, listening to your heart and mind, steering your work gently without trying to push it towards a preconceived goal with force.

But it’s exhiliarating. And incredibly fulfilling. When I follow this process, I end up surprising myself every single time. The results are never what I would’ve produced if I had started with an outline and a specific goal. Writing without a plan has made me realize that my mind is capable of making surprising connections in the moment if I allow it to react to the work I’m doing rather than follow a script I’ve written beforehand.

This blog post was written using the same process. It might not be my best work, but I feel it turned out alright.