Greta Gerwig Quotes

I like to sit down every day and not know where the book is going. I have no idea where the book is going to go or how it's going to end as I'm writing it.

I just let the character speak to me and things appear.

I write sentence to sentence. That's the kind of writer I am. I don't have a plot when I begin. I have to be convinced and I have to be surprised.

Stories surge up out of nowhere, and if they feel compelling, you follow them. You let them unfold inside you and see where they are going to lead.

Something people say about acting is that acting is listening. But I think that writing is listening, too. That you really have to listen to what are they saying and what they're communicating to you. And so, a lot of it is just getting stuff down.

The process is different for every book, but there are similarities. I always draw from the inside out. I don't plot them ahead of time, and I'm always surprised by things that happen in my books.

I don't plot with huge detail, just big moments and important elements, and then I have a structure but can fly by the seat of my pants when I write.

If you take a few days to write an outline, you're just making up scenes that you think will work, that you think will be interesting. But as you write it, other ideas occur - better ideas that have to do with what you're writing.

I prefer to surprise myself as I'm writing. I'm not interested in it if I already know where it's going. So I have only the most general sense of what I'm doing when I start a story. I sometimes have a destination in mind, but how the story is going to go from Point A to Point Z is something I make up as I go along.

I'll often dream about characters before I start writing their stories.

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.

I started writing morning pages just to keep my hand in, you know, just because I was a writer and I didn't know what else to do but write. And then one day as I was writing, a character came sort of strolling in and I realized, Oh my God, I don't have to be just a screenwriter. I can write novels.

What I have in advance are people I want to write about and a problem or problems that I see those people encountering and that I want to explore - it all proceeds sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, and scene by scene.

Choosing to write a play is some kind of surrender. I don't make an outline. I sit and work, and suddenly the door opens, and out it comes.

If I knew a story page by page before I started writing it, I just wouldn't do it. The process of discovery is really important for my own enjoyment.

I tend to plan as I write. And I want to leave myself open and the character open to keep on going until it seems to be the time to stop.

The idea that an author can extricate her or his own ongoing life experience from the tale being written is a conceit of very little worth.

I start with a character and a situation, but I don't know what's going to happen until I write it. Sometimes things happen that surprise me.

If I just sit here, what am I going to do? I don't have a trade. I don't teach or anything. I just love to make up characters and gradually build a story around them.

My forte is the plotting. You sit down, and you work out a plot.

When I'm writing a book, sentence by sentence, I'm not thinking theoretically. I'm just trying to work out the story from inside the characters I've got.

You can start imagining all kinds of things characters would feel, but you have to have a sense of whether those imaginings might be right.

I don't start with a list of historical scenes that I want to include in the book. At a certain point, the narrative totally takes over, and everything that I include I can only incorporate if it answers to the internal terms of the novel.

When I write a book, I don't have an idea of what I'm doing. I just go where it leads.

I do better just letting the stories develop. I don't outline very well, and I can't follow it if I do. Once I've outlined it, why write the damn book?