# Every Writer Discovers Somewhere

The Inkagai Way: 100 Practices for a Writing Life

By Anna Lishman & Brad Lishman

Practice 23 · Part 3: Planning and structure

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> Discovery writers find structure through drafting; planners test structure through drafting.

On March 24, 2008, Zadie Smith told a room of Columbia writing students that novelists come in two kinds, and that she was one of them. Macro planners, she said, make notes, organize material, configure a plot, and create a structure before the title page. Micro managers build a house floor by floor, each floor finished and furnished before the next goes on top. Smith is a micro manager. She starts at the first sentence and finishes at the last, and it would not occur to her to choose among three endings, because she does not know the ending until she reaches it. The lecture, “That Crafty Feeling,” later appeared in her collection *Changing My Mind*.

Read closely, the lecture maps where discovery takes place more than it sorts who does it. Every serious process contains discovery, and processes differ in where it happens and at what scale, whether in a sentence, an ending, a voice, or, in nonfiction, the claim itself. Smith finds the ending, the tone, and what the novel is, one sentence at a time. The planners she describes have their houses basically built from day one, and they discover too. They swap endings, take characters out and put them back, reverse chapters, and those discoveries are structural and come after the plan, through the draft pressing against it.

That is easy to nod at and hard to apply, because a label can excuse a blind spot. A writer who says “I’m a discovery writer” may mean that structure arrives through drafting, which is true and respectable, or that structure is no longer her responsibility, which is not. A writer who says “I’m a planner” may mean that he reduces uncertainty before drafting, or that the plan has removed the need for surprise, which no plan does. Either way the label has hardened into an identity, when, as Chapter 4 argued, it should stay a description of where uncertainty is currently placed.

Smith says the planners’ difficulties multiply with their choices. Of herself she says that she suffers a pathology she calls Obsessive Perspective Disorder, and she reworked the first twenty pages of one novel for almost two years. That is an honest report of the revision cost a writer accepts by locating all discovery in drafting, since what the draft finds may not fit what the first hundred pages assumed. McPhee is a clear planner’s case on the other side. He settles an ending before going back to the beginning and builds a structure from coded notes before he writes, yet he says that the structure of a composition dictates itself to some extent and to some extent does not. A planner who locates discovery after the plan accepts a different cost, just as real and, like the first, hardest to notice from inside the method that incurs it: the plan may have excluded something living because it did not fit the diagram.

**Practice.** Take a completed or half-finished piece and, in twenty minutes, list five significant decisions you made in it. They can be small: whether the narrator knows, which example opens the argument, where the first revelation falls, what the ending turned out to be, how the voice sounds. Next to each, mark when you made it, before drafting, while drafting, or after a draft existed. Then look at the pattern. You may find all your discoveries cluster at the sentence level, or in revision, or at the ending, which tells you where your current process is exposed to surprise and where it is protected. It is not a verdict on you. If you want to, choose one place to move a little: plan one thing you usually discover, or leave open one thing you usually settle.

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