There is a particular tyranny to the blue line on a screen - that cheerful guide promising the fastest route, the shortest time, the most efficient journey. I’ve unwittingly become its prisoner, even on roads I’ve travelled a hundred times.
Guides remove uncertainty, and with it, a measure of anxiety. They can even be comforting, giving you assurance of what to expect on the journey. But they come at a cost: the possibility of wonder, and the chance of stumbling upon what we didn’t know we were seeking.
The older I grow, the more I’ve found myself viewing driving not as an act of freedom, but as “dead time” - hours sealed away in a metal box, separated from the craft I love. On the train into London, I could write. But behind a wheel, my hands are occupied, and the mind tethered to the present.
This is a stark contrast to my youth, when I counted the days until seventeen, imagining the moment I could peel away from the driveway and chase whatever lay beyond the next bend. Back then, the road held promise rather than obligation.
The Exploratory Drive
Recently, my wife and I have reclaimed that youthful spirit. We’ve begun what we call “exploratory drives”. The rules are simple: leave in the daylight, choose no destination except what catches our eye, and leave the SatNav sleeping in its digital slumber.
We accept that whatever happens, happens. We use our innate sense of direction, navigating by sun and the lay of the land, free to change course at any point: to be driven, as it were, by curiosity rather than duty.
The result has been a rediscovery of joy - genuine, unplanned joy. Every lane beckons. When an unknown path catches our eye, we take it. When a distant hill we’ve espied a hundred times from our windows calls to us, we make it our heading, watching with eager anticipation as it grows closer with each passing mile. In so doing, we’ve stumbled upon the deep, whispered history of Herefordshire and the Welsh Marches, rounding a bend to find the crumpled stone of a tower built nearly a thousand years ago, standing silent watch over a valley we never knew existed. We’ve found lakes nestled between the sloped shoulders of mountains, gleaming in the last light of day beneath a pale, pastel-coloured sky. We’ve stopped to admire a stranger’s carefully tended garden on a warm late summer’s eve, only to find ourselves in deep conversation with the owner about their soil, their struggles, and their triumphs.
It’s the same joy found when visiting a garden centre for compost, or to replace a broken tool, only to be arrested by an unexpected bloom. We had no intention of buying another plant. It’s not something we planned for, budgeted for, or even considered when cultivating the soil earlier in the year. Yet we cannot leave it behind. We carry it home, pot in hand, wandering our beds until we find where it was meant to be all along - often tucked between established plantings we’d stopped truly seeing. That unplanned addition often becomes the jewel that makes the whole garden sing.
The Map and the Territory
I’ve come to understand that writing follows this same rhythm - this delicate dance between guided design and discovery.
Some days require the SatNav - the beat sheets of Jessica Brody’s Save The Cat! and character templates that prevent us from wandering into impossible terrain. But if we only drive with the SatNav on, we miss the scenery. We miss the discovery. We can, if we’re not careful, miss the joy.
The best days come when I silence the guidance and simply drive. I step away from the keyboard and take up the pen, feeling the friction of ink on paper. I write freely and wildly, as Natalie Goldberg suggests in Writing Down the Bones, letting my hand move without worrying where it leads.
Last month I was drafting an escape scene in my latest project, Project December 1814, when my main character, Eirwen, suddenly collapsed. I hadn’t planned this. My beat sheet called for a desperate, terrifying pursuit through the snow-covered streets of Victorian London in the dead of night. At first I was startled. But the moment I wrote it, I knew it was right - inevitable, even. It made sense - perfect sense - considering all she had been through in the previous chapters. She had barely slept. She had fled for her life the day before. She carried immense guilt for a murder she had unwittingly committed. And now she was running again through a winter storm, trusting her life to strangers. And she’s only eleven.
“Of course her body would give out!” I cried to myself. And with that epiphany came a cascade of discoveries: how each character around her would react, and what those reactions would reveal about who they truly were. None of this was in my outline. Yet it became the heart of the chapter, illuminating everything that followed. I knew where the chapter needed to end. But this unplanned moment showed me why it mattered.
Discovery requires daring. Perhaps it means shifting from third person to first, stepping fully into a character’s skin. Perhaps it means pausing the novel to pen a poem, or writing a diary entry to understand what a character can’t say aloud. The detour often reveals what the map never could.
Take the exploratory drive. Bring home the unexpected plant that wasn’t in the plan. For it is often in the unmapped detours, away from the efficiency and comfort of the beaten path, that we discover what our stories truly need.
