Writing as Discovery

by Jennifer McGaha

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On a beautiful July morning in 2004, my husband, three kids, and I headed down the trail to Hidden Lake Overlook in Glacier National Park. The skies were clear, the air warm with a gentle breeze. About a mile down the meandering trail, however, thick clouds rolled in. The temperature plummeted, and we were ensconced in a mist so thick we couldn’t see more than a foot in front of us. Turning back toward the trailhead, we held onto one another as we inched along. Then, in the distance, the mist began to take shape and form, the figures growing more and more distinct until finally we could make out two bighorn sheep facing us in the trail. While generally docile, rams in rut can be aggressive, but these were wild and wooly with tranquil eyes and grand, looping horns. Rising from the mist like spirits, they calmly watched us watching them until eventually the clouds parted, revealing blue sky, and we eased around them. In the mist that day, I discovered something amazing, or it discovered me, but in any case, the image of those sheep, the thrill of that discovery, stays with me to this day.

Writing memoir, for me, is like this—a backwoods stroll that, with one sudden shift in weather, becomes an adventure. “Writing is an act of discovery,” Brenda Ueland says in her craft book If You Want to Write. And so it has been for me. I am not an outliner, a diagrammer, a Scrivenerer. I do not begin knowing where I will end up or even what I will discover along the way. Maybe I will write about the mouse I found in the goats’ water bucket when I went down to the barn that morning or maybe I will write about cheesemaking or training a new puppy. I simply sit down and begin, and eventually, if I sit there long enough, something will come to me. Or perhaps nothing will come to me, and I will have to sit there all afternoon until it is time for me to get up and take the dogs for a walk or make a pot of chili or eat a bowl of ice cream, in which case, I will have to sit back down the next day and again the next and again the next until finally the clouds begin to take on a certain shape and form, and I see what my story is becoming.

You can write without discovery, of course, and if you get all the basic craft elements right—scenes filled with sensory details and compelling dialogue, well-rounded characters, reflective voice, narrative arc, and so on—maybe no one will even notice. But why on earth would you? Why, with as hard as it is to write anything, with all the time and love and grit you put into the creation of your art, would you settle for anything less than two stunning bighorn rams rising out of the mist?

A different version of this piece originally appeared in Brevity in 2020.

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