Do Instinctive Writers Exist?

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Deleted member 58005

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Not sure if instinctive's the correct term for it, but I consider myself one. Anyway, in my terms, it's a writer who simply writes. No thinking beforehand, no planning. Everything comes to them while they write.

Every time I get on my phone, the moment I open Docs, and the keyboard pulls up, every word just comes to mind. If I were to liken it to something, it would be the sensation of multiple jigsaw pieces just fitting into place constantly. It's exhilarating. It's probably why I started writing.

Just curious if anybody else is like this :blob_hmm:
 
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Missivist

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Some writers historically have written a million words per year. One of them was "boys' story" writer Charles Hamilton, and another was a romance novelist who wrote something like 23 books per year. (Romance novels may be a bit thin: 55,000 words per book.) I doubt that they had any time for research or self-editing, so they were probably writing "by the seat of their pants": instinctive writing.

Hamilton wrote stories set in English boys' schools, and he used many pen-names. It would help that his audience of schoolboys would not be very critical of plot-holes or grammar mistakes. No research, no editing, just lotsa typing: an estimated 100,000,000 words in his lifetime.

There are still a number of romance novelists who write thousands of words in a few hours per day, and publish several books per year. Their reported productivity appears to be close to my typing speed, which suggests "seat of the pants" writing, with little room for research, advance planning, or even self-editing. Google "professional romance novelist words a day".

So, I figure the key to success as an instinctive writer is to have naturally good grammar so that you can write the way you speak, while working in a genre that lets you be very repetitive and requires no specialist knowledge. You have to make it up as you go along, but that should work well for cookie-cutter isekai stories, for example. Such a writer should be able to knock out a light novel every month or two.
 
Succubiome

Succubiome

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I'm pretty closer to pantser.

I do a bit of daydreaming about possible directions for the story, have a general plan for the next chapter but not usually much further, and don't usually do more than a single editing pass.
 
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