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The Spectrum of Writing Styles
My Journey to Discover Mine and How You Can Too
You’ve probably read and listened to a lot about different writing styles, namely the big two: discovery vs outlining. Which style works best? That answer is different for every writer, but most would say they utilize a little of both. So how do you find out which is right for you? And in what balance?
My experience in finding what works best for me happened over the span of over a decade and somewhat accidentally. When I started writing as a kid, I went all out discovery. Just going with the idea for the story and winging it, writing whatever popped into my head and where ever the story took me. It was definitely fun writing that way and I wrote a handful of stories that way.
Then around the age of fourteen, something flipped and I wasn’t finishing any of the stories anymore. I’d get an exciting idea, run with it for twenty or so pages, and then it would fizzle out and I would either get bored with it or have no idea where it was going. So I’d jump on to something else and kept doing this until I had several barely started, abandoned stories.
That’s when I started outlining. I was working on a story I really enjoyed and believed in, but I kept getting stuck. So when I started each new chapter, before I dove in I would make a rough outline of what needed to happen in the chapter. And then I’d write it out.
This seemed to work out pretty well for me, so when I thought of my next story, before starting, I outlined the whole thing start to finish. It still worked pretty well and I was able to finish it, but the process was awful. I remember getting really bored with that story and starting to hate it. The only thing that kept me going was that I knew where to go thanks to the outline and deep down, I knew I liked the story. But the whole writing process was hard and frustrating. Well, more than it normally is.
I kept writing that way for a while: coming up with an outline, writing the story from that outline, and slowly starting to hate it and lose all joy it would normally have brought me.
Then, after first writing the outline, I started working on my current story and got stuck early in. Even with the outline, I couldn’t seem to write any of…
