Writing Into the Unknown

There’s a widespread belief among new writers that you have to know the whole story before you can begin. Plan every beat. Map every scene. Only then, when all the risk is removed, can you start writing.

This belief has stopped more novels than writer’s block ever did.

Planners and Pantsers

Writers divide roughly into two camps: plotters (who outline everything in advance) and pantsers (who write “by the seat of their pants,” discovering the story as they go). Neither approach is superior. Many successful writers use a hybrid of both.

What matters is understanding what works for you — and recognising that uncertainty is not the enemy of good writing. Often, it’s the source of it.

Trusting Your Characters

Robert Boswell argues that the best fiction emerges from “half-known worlds” — places of genuine uncertainty where the writer doesn’t fully know what will happen next. When you trust your characters enough to let them surprise you, they often do things you wouldn’t have planned — things that are more honest and more interesting than anything you could have engineered in advance.

A character who does the unexpected thing often does the right thing for the story, because it comes from their inner logic rather than your outer plan.

The Productive Discomfort of Not Knowing

Writing into the unknown feels uncomfortable. You don’t know if the scene will work. You don’t know if the plot will hold together. This discomfort is real — and it’s also the feeling of being fully alive in the work.

The draft is a conversation with yourself. The draft is how you find out what you actually think, what your characters actually want, what your story is actually about. You can’t discover that from an outline. You can only discover it by writing.

Your Drill

Start a short story — aim for 500 words — without planning the ending first. Begin with a character in a specific place, wanting something specific. Write forward. When you finish, blog about how it felt to write without knowing where you were going. What surprised you?