People ask me sometimes how much of Axiom Flux I had planned before I started writing it. The honest answer is: less than you’d think, and less than I expected myself, going in.
I always start a book knowing roughly where it ends, an emotional shape I’m writing toward, and a handful of beats I want to hit along the way. For AF, I knew Amaiy would end up transformed, that it would cost him something real, and that the book would close on an unresolved note pointing into the next one. That’s about it. Everything else, the actual shape of the middle, who he’d meet, what would go wrong, who wouldn’t make it. I found out the same way you’re finding it out: by reading it as I wrote it.
That’s a strange thing to admit as an author, because it makes it sound like I’m not in control of my own book. In a sense, I’m not, not in the way outlining writers are. What I am is present for it. When Amaiy grafted a Gibdon out of jealousy over Yeyi, I didn’t plan that scene three chapters in advance. I wrote up to the moment where he was hurt and humiliated and reaching for something, anything, that would make the ache stop, and the graft was just what was there. It felt true to who he was in that moment, so I followed it, and then I had to live with what it cost him for the rest of the book, the same as he did.
Yeyi’s death is probably the sharpest example. I didn’t sit down that day planning to kill her. But I’d written a culture where love is supposed to be freely given, where selfishness has real social consequences, and once she made the choices she made, and once the story showed me how little anyone around her actually valued her in that moment, the ending she got was simply where the logic of the world I’d built pointed. I felt it arrive more than I decided it.
I think this is the part discovery writing does that outlining sometimes struggles to: it lets the world’s own rules generate consequences you didn’t personally choose to inflict. I built Eyonimic culture to have real teeth around generosity and belonging. I didn’t build it thinking “and this is how I’ll punish a character later.” But once it existed, it had opinions about what should happen to someone who violated it. I just had to be honest enough to let it.
The tradeoff is that I don’t always know what I’m handing my future self. Amaiy’s Assumption with Mozhe was written the same way the Gibdon graft was, fast, impulsive, barely examined. and only after I’d written it did I realize I’d repeated the exact same pattern I’d already put him through once. I hadn’t planned that echo. I found it days later, rereading, and had to decide whether it was an accident worth fixing or a truth about him worth keeping. I kept it. Sometimes discovery writing hands you a theme you didn’t know you were building until it’s already there, staring back at you.
If you’re a discovery writer too, or thinking about becoming one: the thing nobody tells you is that it’s not less work than outlining. It’s the same work, just paid on a different schedule. You don’t spend it up front deciding what happens. You spend it constantly, chapter by chapter, asking “given everything true so far, what would actually happen next,” and then having the nerve to let the answer stand, even when it’s not the answer you would have picked if you’d been asked in advance.