a.k.a. We're making shit up as we go along.

Here we go, a journal nobody ever asked for but which I'm going to make anyway.

I understand that I am an influence on some people. Not many, but some. For that I am glad. I feel honored really.
One of my standing tenets in regards to writing so far has been "As long as even one person enjoys it, it was worth the time", and if I managed to inspire and influence people to do their own thing with my writing, then that's even better.

Something something no man is an island. Some people may think that writing is a competition, but its really not. We shouldn't look upon the works of others and be jealous because of what they did, but instead cherish things for those works can enrich all of us.


See what's happening? I've set out to write about my writing style and instead drifted off into unrelated things, but which are hopefully still somewhat logically connected.
In a way, that is exploration in a nutshell.

Now you can take to Youtube and find essays of varying length and quality about this style of writing, and those people will probably do a better job of explaining it than I will.
But I will still add my own two cents, as it adds to the stupendous hoard of knowledge that is available to us.


Now lets get to it.
The name already might clue you in as to what Exploration is. You just set out in your writing and discover things really. When I sit down to write a story, I only have the loosest idea of how it will go.
I generally have a vague destination in mind, a direction to go. Some pointers as to what should happen.
But how we get there, and how those things eventually really play out are up in the air.

This does have, as you may imagine, several advantages and disadvantages.
A big advantage is that you can start writing almost immediately with minimal prep-time. You just sit down and make shit up as you go.
It gives an incredible liberty to things and allows events to develop in a much more natural way. To use a metaphor: You are laying down the train tracks as you go and as the terrain permits, rather than forcing the terrain to conform to your ideas of a railroad.
In my opinion, it leads to - somewhat - more believable characters and events. It is easier to follow the logic since it grew naturally from the circumstances that have been presented, rather than making leaps and bounds just to tick off the stations on the list of events that should happen.
To be super pretentious here, it allows for stuff to be more tense, exciting, and thrilling, after all how can the reader know what happens next when the author themselves didn't know either?

But there are disadvantages, and boy let me tell ya, those are some chonky disadvantages.
A lot of it stems from the whole "Not planning ahead" part really.
As you write, you have to pay incredible attention to what you have already introduced in the story, so that your work remains internally consistent.
Exploration can open up an ungodly amount of plot holes or forgotten story pieces. Its easy to introduce elements that fall completely by the wayside and never get mentioned again despite seeming like a big deal at the time. That is of course not that big of a problem when the story you write is a rather short piece, but as its length increases - and much more importantly the time you work on it - its increasingly likely for such things to sneak into the story.
So I'd recommend that you have a notepad open on the side to add events and characters - and changes to them - as you go along to keep track of things. Which admittedly makes me a bit of a hypocrite because I fucking don't do it.

I instead elect to waste precious hours on rereading all the shit I've already put down instead to make sure I remain somewhat consistent with myself.

An absolute obscene travesty in that regard was my Draconic Dystopia story which I never published where I went around and changed traits of the dragon race several times over. I increased their base density and elevated them from being human-like in weight distribution to be closer to iron. I had to change so many mentions of weights that either the dragons had or were lifting at the time. It really took steam out of writing.

And that's another disadvantage of this style of writing.
You need to have the... proper mindset for it, I suppose. This is probably going to be the least helpful and coherent part in an exploration that was already very light on both things.
While you write, you need to be able to allow your mind to roam and explore ideas. To fully consider the ramifications, the consequences an action could have further down the line, and which other actions it could trigger.
But you are also at the mercy of circumstances. A lack of a storyboard can be a big problem. To use another metaphor: you can easily be rudderless in an ocean of possibility, with no charts, maps or stars to guide you. And woe to you if that sea turns stormy.

In the wake of my father's passing several months ago, things have been very stormy here indeed, which is why I had... have this lul of activity.
Things have simply become uncomfortable, and that is poison to Exploration.

You need to be able to sit down and just let your mind roam.

I hope this was helpful to some of you and raised curiosity on this or familiar topics.

As said, there are a bunch of essays you can go and check out.