Mitski Quotes

I end up writing about all kinds of things. I never make an attempt to write about anything in particular. I don't have a little list of topics to write about.

I'm a great believer in letting lyrics just flow out, wherever they come from.

The way I write is very much without kind of a goal. I have something I'm interested in and then I decide I'm going to explore it. I don't know where the characters are going to go, I don't know what the movie is going to do or what the screenplay is going to do. For me, that's the way to keep it alive.

I'm not the sort of writer who can plan out things. Mostly I have no idea where I'm going.

The important discovery I made very early is that my novels had to be written without any given plan or outline. I can't do it in any other way. But then they are dependent on the sentences, my intuition, and, as I have experienced many times, the subconscious.

One thing I can tell you is this, that I am not a methodical writer.

When I start to write, I don't have any plan at all. I just wait for the story to come.

In writing, I'm totally anti-plans of any kind. All my attempts to plan and plot novels have come to grief, and in expensive ways.

I just write what comes along. I don't have a detailed master plan.

I realized I had a novel on my hands, but didn't know where it was going to go. So I thought, 'I'm going to do everything that you're not supposed to do when you plan a novel; I'm going to step back and let this thing take itself wherever it wants to go, and I'm not going to worry about how things connect until later on.'

I never work from an outline, and often I don't know how the story will end.

I don't like outlining, because books are organic things. Sometimes a book doesn't want to be written in a certain way.

I don't outline; I listen to a kind of whisper inside the material.

I cannot outline. I do not know what the next thing is going to happen in the book until it comes out of my fingers.

Even if you plan your book, the actual writing is unplanned.

I might see something on TV and get inspired to write about it. I can't sit down and plan to write. It has to come to me in my head like someone telling me the words.

I don't work in a straight line. I don't write with an outline. I write where I can see things happen, and then things get glued together.

I don't write thinking directly about what I'm feeling, usually. I just let myself write whatever comes out without it necessarily being directly a translation of what I'm aware that I'm feeling, you know?

I'm often just writing just to write. I'm not writing with...If I write, like, sitting down with a goal in mind, it's always, like, the worst. It turns into a ska song even if I'm trying to write like a horror movie sound track or something.

You will write if you will write without thinking of the result in terms of a result, but think of the writing in terms of discovery, which is to say that creation must take place between the pen and the paper, not before in a thought or afterwards in a recasting... It will come if it is there and if you will let it come.

I write almost purely by instinct. I've never made an outline.

I've never written a book with an outline or a predetermined theme. It's only in retrospect that themes or subjects become identifiable. That's the fun of it: discovering what's next. I'm often surprised by plot developments I would not have dreamed of starting out, but that, in the course of the writing, come to seem inevitable.

When I decide to write a story, I don't think too much about what I want it to be, I just let things come naturally and this is how it turns out. It's just how my subconscious works.

When I write a story, I have no idea what I'm doing. All I know is that I want to share something with my readers. The whole idea of writing is this place where you lose control, where you're irresponsible - it's a very liberating place.

I had no idea what I was doing when I wrote 'Search.' There was no carefully designed work plan. There was no theory that I was out to prove.