Writing By The Seat Of Your Pants / Literature

• An excellent summation of this trope from E L Doctorow: "It's like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole journey that way." (Also quoted by Anne Lamott.) For this reason, writers sometimes call this "the headlight method." (Some change it to "flashlight.")
• Ray Bradbury fleshed out his short story The Fireman into the novel Fahrenheit 451 at a pay typewriter in 9 days.
  • There's a famous Bradbury quote on his method of writing that pretty eloquently sums up this trope: "You've got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down."
• Isaac Asimov was on record as stating that, while he usually had an end in mind, he almost never had any idea how he'd get there.
  • In a specific example, Asimov wrote the story "Insert Knob A in Hole B" on the spot during a televised panel when challenged to do so after he claimed he could write under any circumstance. He completed the story within 30 minutes, in part by using the panel discussion as inspiration and by including his fellow panelists in the story since the Studio Audience could see them and thus would not have to imagine what they look like.
• Garth Nix says this is how he writes - most of his world-building is made up on the spot.
• Stephen King falls into this category — he never plans ahead, he just writes until he has a good idea and runs with it.
  • The Green Mile may be his best example of this. It was originally released in installments. At the time the first installment was released to the public, he hadn't even figured out the ending yet... but still scheduled a set release date for it. By the time he started the final part he'd completely forgotten about Mr. Jingles, and it's only thanks to his wife asking what happened to him that he didn't become a literal What Happened to the Mouse?.
  • King said in On Writing that he does occasionally plot his stories, he just does it rarely because he usually isn't proud of the results (like Rose Madder and Insomnia) when he does—with one exception: The Dead Zone.
  • Christine is another notable case, as it awkwardly switches from first to third person due to King not thinking through putting the story's narrator in the hospital with a broken leg.
  • The Stand is a case where the book almost got the better of the writer. King says he described the novel-in-progress to friends as "his own personal Vietnam," and when he got to a certain point, he was stuck. His good guys were in Boulder, his bad guys were in Vegas, moles among both camps, and....now what? He was about to simply quit writing it when he realized that what he needed was a bomb in the closet to get his good guys' attention and to tell them it was time to take their titular Stand.
• Cory Doctorow wrote Little Brother in eight days.
• The NaNoWriMo project lends itself to this approach. Participants are given 30 days to see if they can write at least 50,000 words. ^note Not all NaNoWriMo writers write by the seat of their pants. The rules allow writers to have character sketches, plot summaries, and even extensive, detailed outlines — as long as none of the actual prose is written before 12:00 AM on November 1.
• The Reverend Lionel Fanthorpe churned out novels for Badger Books on the basis of a book cover, a title, and a very short deadline. Badger's policies mean it's impossible to tell exactly how many he wrote, but the estimate works out at one 158 page book every twelve days. To manage this, he dictated into a reel to reel tape recorder, then shipped the tapes off to a pool of typists for transcription. To hit the word target, he would pad out the books with philosophical discussions, mundane detail and redundant descriptions (robots: "Metal things. Metal things that could think. Thinking metal things"), but then could be told that he had only three pages left to wrap up the story, so he had to pull out a Deus ex Machina. Despite, or perhaps because of all this, Fanthorpe's work has picked up a So Bad, It's Good following.
• L. Ron Hubbard claims he wrote by meditating into a trance-like state and typing constantly for hours at a time. According to Harlan Ellison, Hubbard used the Jack Kerouac method — he rigged a roll of butcher paper of the appropriate width to feed into his typewriter, wrote for several hours, and at the end cut the long sheet down into even pages.
• As revealed in The History of Middle-earth, J. R. R. Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings this way with no real plans to what would happen chapter to chapter (including having no idea how the book would end). He finally made a rough draft once the gang got to Rivendell and kept adding new elements as they occurred. The character of Faramir especially came out of nowhere as Tolkien was writing Frodo and Sam's journey.
• Douglas Adams wrote The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy this way largely - throw out tons of ideas, then return later when it seems like one of them is funny or could be made relevant (like the potted plant saying "Oh no, not again"). As you can imagine, Adams was terrible at deadlines and finished the first book on that page because his publisher was furious. He once remarked, "Writing is easy. You just stare at a blank page until your forehead starts to bleed."
• Robert B. Parker of the Spenser, Sunny Randall and Jesse Stone series wrote like this and compared it to being like the detectives of his novels never knowing what was coming next.
• Horace Kelton once replied to a friend that he didn't know "what [his] next book would be about. The characters [hadn't] told [him]." But he still planned some once he got the basic idea.
• Charles de Lint writes that way and refers to it as an "organic" style of writing.
• Terry Pratchett usually wrote with a plan, but in an interview said that while writing the assassin's "driving test" in Pyramids, he had absolutely no idea how it would unfold, and consequently it was one of his favorite moments in the Discworld series.
  • When he sat down to write Guards! Guards! he intended for Carrot Ironfounderson to be the main character, with Samuel Vimes being a minor character who was there to provide a viewpoint character in the city before Carrot arrived. As he wrote the novel Vimes took over as the main character.
  • When writing Thief of Time, he knew that Ronnie Soak was the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse, but he only worked out what his actual name in that role was at about the same time as Lu-Tze. Specifically, he ran to the mirror with a bit of paper with SOAK written on it to make sure he wasn't imagining it. He figured his subconscious had been working ahead of him.
• Haruki Murakami swears to this type of writing, never knowing the ending when he begins a story.
• Stanisław Lem wrote Solaris that way. It is considered to be his best book which is saying something because his other works are nothing short of brilliance.
• The cast of Writing Excuses have often talked about the difference between being an outliner vs. a discovery writer. Dan Wells, author of the John Cleaver Trilogy is a self-confessed discovery writer, but Brandon Sanderson is very much an outliner.
• Hunter S. Thompson not only did this, but he also made it the essence of Gonzo journalism: Your notes, more or less unedited, are the finished product. He would frequently spend hours or days locked up in his room with a typewriter, a whole bunch of paper, and half a ton of drugs and booze, hammering away furiously to send a long, rambling, yet somehow incredibly cogent piece off to Rolling Stone or whatever other publication he was writing for at the time. He famously declared his most famous work, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas to be a failed experiment in Gonzo journalism, as he had edited it too much.
• Ellen Potter, author of The Kneebone Boy, had no idea how it would end when she wrote it and was, at her own admission, stuck on the ending for months until writing something that came to her at the gym. Unfortunately, a lot of plot threads are left dangling as a result.
• The 20th Anniversary Edition of Timothy Zahn's Heir to the Empire has a lot of notes in the margins, which reveal that the book changed a lot during the process from first draft/outline to completed manuscript. Most big ideas were set early on, but small details seem to have come spontaneously, like Luke drinking hot chocolate. He also threw in a consistently varied selection of cryptic side references, mostly used to make the galaxy feel bigger like the films did. Later many of these were picked up in order to perform some remarkable feats of Arc Welding - but as he notes while explaining,
  Still, don't let all these clever explanations give you the impression that I had this whole immense thing mapped out in advance. Right now, I'm using the Indiana Jones approach, and making it up as I go.
• George R. R. Martin describes the technique like taking a road trip. You know the broad strokes of the trip—where you start and where you end, and maybe some of the major roads you'll be driving along the way. But you don't know what diner you'll be eating at on day three; you don't know about the construction on the I-95; you don't know that you'll stop at a tourist trap you didn't even know existed during the detour...
• Calum P Cameron apparently writes the Mediochre Q Seth Series by formulating a basic plan, typing until he gets stuck, then walking his pet dog until he spontaneously comes up with enough new scenes to start typing again. Or he did, until the dog died. Presumably, he still adheres to the trope, though, just without the dog-walking bit.
• The authors of Animorphs had no plans at all for the overarching plot going in - they came up with a plot synopsis before each book, but beyond that, they didn't have a clue. (The one exception seems to be their knowing ahead of time that Rachel would die at the end.)
• Lois McMaster Bujold, author of the Vorkosigan Saga, has stated that she writes like this, comparing her style to the meticulous and structured method of her friend and fellow author Patricia C. Wrede.
• An variant of this trope is when the author lets dice (or any random generator) decide over the plot. Paradise of Swords by Tobias Meißner is a good example - almost an RPG-as-book. Probably better known is Il castello dei destini incrociati by Italo Calvino. And Philip K Dick famously wrote The man in the high castle by rolling coins and reading the resulting I-Ching passages.
• The author of Destined to Lead claims this as her main writing style. Not surprising as the books were written during NaNoWriMo.
• Ben Mezrich had to do this for The Accidental Billionaires because it was optioned and adapted into The Social Network right off of its book proposal without a completed manuscript.
• The Warrior Cats arcs are never fully planned out in advance and as a result, major things can change; this is why Hollyleaf ended up not being one of the Three because they still couldn't think of a power for her halfway through the Power of Three arc. The story team even pointed out in an article on the official site that they need to write prophecies vague enough that there's room for different interpretation in case something changes in the story.
• Wildbow, author of Worm, makes a point of this as one way of making the writing process more interesting for himself. Virtually every chapter of Worm is written just the day before publishing, often finishing shortly before the midnight deadline, and he has set himself a minimum length of 6000 words. He has missed an update only twice-both by mere minutes, and both times due to technical issues.
  • Taken to the extreme in Arc 8 of Worm, where he literally rolled dice to see which characters would die in the Kaiju Leviathan's attack on Brockton Bay. Not just for minor characters, but up to and including the protagonist herself, with only a vague backup plan for which character would become the new protagonist if roll had gone badly for her.
  • Despite this, much of the plot itself was planned out prior to writing; Interlude 26 had been planned for since the very beginning, according to Word of God.
• Ni Kuang, author of the Wisely series, freely admitted to having to write so fast and so much that he didn't have time to do any research for the books.

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