I never know what’s going to happen in a novel. I don’t have a plan or an outline.
I never work from an outline, and often I don’t know how the story will end.
Need a body-confidence boost? Pick up a pair of dumbbells and let your gaze linger on the outline of your biceps as you lift the weights.
I love the Web, but the basis of my work is going through the physical books. When you go to the library, you see other books around on the shelves that you never knew existed. You can flip through a book and see the whole outline of it.
I don’t outline. I sit down to write, and I take the ride. If something starts to not feel right, I go back to the last place that felt like jazz to me.
If you do enough planning before you start to write, there’s no way you can have writer’s block. I do a complete chapter by chapter outline.
What I do is creative. It doesn’t seem like that when I’m playing a piece that was written in the past, but the score is just the outline and everything in it is relative. The key is to make this piece written by someone else belong to you and then connect to the audience.
In fiction, you have a rough idea what’s coming up next – sometimes you even make a little outline – but in fact you don’t know. Each day is a whole new – and for me, a very invigorating – experience.
One of my more hectoring voices, throughout my career, has been the one that says I ought to stop what I’m doing and make an outline.
Tax reform exists, sort of, as an outline – miles away from being actual passed legislation.
Every discourse, even a poetic or oracular sentence, carries with it a system of rules for producing analogous things and thus an outline of methodology.
I am a big outliner. For my adult book, ‘The Visibles,’ I did not outline, and it took me two years to write because I just didn’t outline, and I had no path.
I tend to start books with a very broad outline, but I always leave room for happy accidents. With ‘The Passenger,’ there were perhaps too many of those.
Well, I outline fanatically. I am a long thinker and a slow writer, though I am trying to get faster.
Outlining is like putting on training wheels. It gives me the courage to write, but we always go off the outline.
I always work from an outline.
The most challenging and exciting aspect is the outline and formation of the plot points. This is the stage where the notion of the story begins to take shape, and I can see glimpses of what is to come.
Ebola so scary and so unfamiliar, it’s really important to outline what the facts are and that we know how to control it. We control it by traditional public health measures. We do that, and Ebola goes away.
I used to be an obsessive outliner – figuring that writing without an outline was like jumping off a cliff and building a parachute on the way down.
The time I trust will come, perhaps within the lives of some of us, when the outline of this science will be clearly made out and generally recognised, when its nomenclature will be fixed, and its principles form a part of elementary instruction.
I remember during Easter one year, I was to get a pair of black patent shoes but you could only get them from the white stores, so my mother drew the outline of my feet on a brown paper bag in order to get the closest size, because we weren’t allowed to go in the store to try them on.
In my stand-up, I generally improvise from an outline.
I don’t really outline. I just kind of know where I’m going in my head, so I’ll write and discover it for myself. Or I’ll just write an entire episode and throw it out because I land on an idea and realize that’s where I should jump off from.
The beginning of an acquaintance whether with persons or things is to get a definite outline of our ignorance.
Writing is a process of discovering. I could never outline a narrative; that just sounds boring. There’s no joy of discovery in what you’re doing if that’s your strategy.
When I sat down and wrote the first paragraph, I was like, ‘Oh, I can go with this.’ I didn’t do an outline. I didn’t do anything. I just wrote sentence by sentence, not knowing where the story was going.
In ‘The Purity Myth,’ I not only discuss what the purity myth is and reveal its consequences for women, but also outline a new way for us to think about young women as moral actors, one that doesn’t include their bodies.
I tend to write some, then outline some, then delete some, then go back and rewrite some. I love revising and hate first drafts. I have to wear bedroom slippers. My current favorites come from the Zetter Hotel in London. They have little tobacco pipes on the toes.
Before the lipstick goes anywhere near the lips, I like to apply a tiny amount of foundation or concealer to create a really great base. This then makes it easier to guide the bullet of the lipstick along the lip outline.
That was, in writing the ‘Twilight’ script I had about five weeks to write that. I’d taken about a month to write the outline and then it was slam into a script and write it down fast because the writer’s strike was looming.
We propose in the following Treatise to give an outline of the Science which treats of the Nature, the Production, and the Distribution of Wealth. To that Science we give the name of Political Economy.
Systematic theology – be careful how you tie down the Word to fit your set and final creeds, systems, dogmas, and organized theistic philosophies! The Word of God is not bound! It’s free to say what it will to the individual, and no one can outline it into dispensations which cannot be broken.
The thing with making your art your business is: It’s a business. You can’t sit around waiting for the muse, especially when you run a show, and you’re in production, and an outline is due, a script is due, and a reshoot is due. No. You look at the calendar, and you go, ‘OK. I can write from 4 to 6.’ So you write.
I am a big proponent of writing a great outline. That way you can avoid hitting a roadblock. There is no worse feeling than writing yourself into a corner but if you’ve figured it all out in the outline then you won’t have that problem.
All your life, you live so close to truth, it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye. And when something nudges it into outline, it is like being ambushed by a grotesque.
A commission and an original are two different things, and both have their virtues and vices. A commission is a bit more collaborative, in that you outline the story that you think should be told, and then you write it. And then, there are notes and you change it, in the conventional studio system.
I’m not a gun nut, but go out on my porch. Look around – what’s there? Zero, nothing. If I had a problem out here, well, the police would arrive just in time to draw the chalk outline on my floor.
The first sequel thing I wrote was this ‘Forever Dawn’ thing that will never get out, because it’s horrid. But it’s a really good outline for ‘Breaking Dawn’ – it’s very similar. I knew what I was doing, which is good, because I think if I hadn’t, there might have been a lot of pressure.
I’ve found that in fiction – and this is just the kind of writer I am – I can’t really work from an outline. I have a vague idea of the characters at the beginning of the book, and then I have a vague idea of whatever the end of the book will be, but I can’t approach creative nonfiction like that.
There’s an outline for each of the books that I adhere to pretty closely, but I’m not averse to taking it in a new direction, as long as I can get it back to where I need it to go.
I usually start with an ending, then outline high points of things that happen, and kind of make up the rest as I go along. Occasionally, the characters surprise me, and I wonder how we got here. Other times, the characters are stubborn and won’t do something I want them to in the story.
The more work you put in on your outline and getting the skeleton of your story right, the easier the process is later.
Coaches who can outline plays on a black board are a dime a dozen. The ones who win get inside their player and motivate.
I never do a full outline, and if I did, I would not feel bound to it, because the view from inside a scene can be different from the view outside it. But neither do I just start writing and see what happens; I am far more disciplined than that.
The entire purpose of the State of the Union Address is for the president to outline where we stand as a nation.
Since I don’t outline my books very much, I feel like sometimes I don’t have a choice in what the characters do; they just kind of take over sometimes.
The issue is: how do you engage the audience? And one of the things I talk to our communicators about is: The outline is great; the stories are great. But how do you engage them? How do you make it feel like we are on a journey, not you are just up there giving me information.
The way that people have gotten on board with me is the most encouraging thing in the world, but it’s all very connected to the 14 years I’ve been on tour with Steel Train, even my band before that, Outline, and then fun. and now Bleachers.
If you do come across ‘Sanctus’ in a bookshop, please see past the cross on the cover and the sinister outline of a monk and just read the first page and make your own mind up. If it’s still not for you, then that’s fine; just put it back and walk away.
