Writing into the Dark: How to Write a Novel without an Outline

by Dean Wesley Smith

That’s what writing into the dark is all about. Pure exploration of a story.

The creative side knows story, knows what needs to be in a story.

And no editor or license holder ever noticed the book was different from the outline they approved. Not once.

if you are going to be around for a long time and writing, you need to feed the reader part of your brain and just write for fun.

Critical voice in humans is there to protect us. In writing, it wants to stop you from making a fool of yourself, or from putting out a bad product. (Thus the intense desire to keep rewriting over and over.)

Truth: When you are writing new words, you are never wasting your time.

The critical voice isn’t your creative voice. Your critical voice can only dig up old ideas and old plots and parrot them back to readers already familiar with the plot.

Just write the next sentence that follows logically through the character from the previous sentence.

This is what I have always done as a writer. I don’t know what’s going to happen next until I know what’s happening NOW>

There is no point at all writing into the dark if you are going to give your critical voice permission to ruin what you did.

Depth is caused by having a character be firmly in a setting with opinions and all five senses and emotions about the setting.

Don’t get sloppy because the writing suddenly got difficult. Just stay with the characters and stay in their heads and write the next sentence. Trust your process.

All problems your creative voice thinks of MUST BE FIXED AT ONCE. You are writing in creative voice. Stay in creative voice and fix the issues the creative voice comes up with instantly.

In creative mode, nothing is set in stone. You are not locked into the moment you are typing. You can go anywhere in the story and type at any point in the manuscript.

Cycling, knowing you will be done when you hit the end, makes you fix any problem or mistake instantly, the moment you see or discover the problem. So say a character says something to another character and your creative voice goes, “Damn it, that wasn’t set up.” You instantly pop out of the timeline and go back and set it up and then work toward the white space again.

When writing into the dark, just let the story be what the story wants to be.

—Never Write for Anyone But Yourself Basically, stop writing to market. If you entertain yourself, enjoy the uncertainty, and write the books you want to read, writing into the dark is a joy.