Discovery Writing Resources

At the end of my book By the Seat of Your Pants: Secrets of Discovery Writing, I included a modest list of resources for readers to explore. I reproduce it here for those who bought the print version and may not have access to “live” links, or for anyone who wants to bookmark it, whether they have read my book or not! Enjoy!

Books - Discovery Writing

Survival Kit for Writers Who Don’t Write Right
Patricia McLinn

The Pocket Guide to Pantsing [Full Audiobook]
M.L. Ronn
(This is a very recent release that I did not find until after I had written this book! YouTube reading is by the author, but links to purchase the book are in the shownotes.)

Write Into the Dark: How to Write a Novel without an Outline
Dean Wesley Smith

Books - Related

Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
(Csikszentmihalyi was the pioneer in the study of “flow state” as discussed here, so it is worth looking at some of his work to understand it better.)

Romancing the Beat
Gwen Hayes

The Magic of Sleep Thinking: How to Solve Problems, Reduce Stress, and Increase Creativity While You Sleep
Eric Maisel and Natalya Maisel

Intuitive Editing: A Creative & Practical Guide to Revising Your Writing
Tiffany Yates Martin

Writing on the Intuitive Side of the Brain
Lauren Sapala

Dear Writer: Are You Intuitive?
Becca Syme and Susan Bischoff

Articles

How to Embrace Being a Discovery Writer by Mallika Kamat

Kendra Patterson’s blog category for “Discovery Writing”

Writing Tips: Outlining/Plotting Vs Discovery Writing/Pantsing at Joanna Penn’s blog

Interview with John Swartzwelder in the New Yorker (included here for his reference to the “Crappy Little Elf” version of discovery writing he did while working on The Simpsons.)

Miscellaneous

Joanna Penn’s interview with Patricia McLinn

Brandon Sanderson’s BYU class on Fantasy Writing

Becca Syme’s Quit Cast Playlist: Intuitive Writers

Prompts Resources

There are many lists of prompts online if you go searching for them! Most of the online prompt generators, though, tend to offer very complex suggestions. Every resource listed here provides mostly bare-bones prompts, which are the best to use for developing discovery writing skills.

Writing Prompts Community on Reddit

A Year of Prompts from ThinkWritten.com

500 Prompts from WrittenWordMedia.com

400+ Writing Prompts from SelfPublishingSchool.com

Writing Prompts on tumblr

Storymatic (the original story card deck system)

The Story Engine Deck (a card deck with endless variations of prompts, including genre-specific ones)

Writing Down the Bones Deck by Natalie Goldberg

Digital Prompt Deck (similar principle to the StoryEngine Deck but less complicated, and entirely online)

Writing Apps

As mentioned in the Non-fiction section. I recommend Scrivener to everyone, but it suffers from a steep learning curve, so YMMV on whether it is worth your time and energy. There are far more apps out there than listed here, but these are the ones I have direct experience with and/or have been recommended by authors I know and respect. (No, I did not “forget” MS Word or OpenOffice or Pages; I do not recommend any of them as full-featured apps for serious writers. If you love them, that’s fine, no offense meant! But I don’t recommend them.)