Ned Beauman Quotes

For all my longer works (i.e. the novels) I write chapter outlines so I can have the pleasure of departing from them later on.

After preliminary research, I zero in on an idea, and then I spend at least four months exploring the topic and in plot-building. I jot down every single detail of the plot as bullet points per chapter, and only when the skeleton is complete do I start writing.

If the novelist isn't surprised by where his book ends up, he or she probably hasn't written anything worth remembering.

I never plot out my novels in terms of the tone of the book. Hopefully, once a story is begun it reveals itself.

I'm a fictional monogamist - I can only work on one thing at a time - but each novel starts growing in my head when I'm about midway through the previous novel.

When I start a new novel, I often write 'test chapters' in different tenses and from different points of view in order to figure out which is best to tell the tale.

You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again.

A novel is a performance you have to plan.

I don't start a novel until I have lived with the story for awhile to the point of actually writing an outline and after a number of books I've learned that the more time I spend on the outline the easier the book is to write. And if I cheat on the outline I get in trouble with the book.

I hate outlines. I have a broad sense of where the story is going; I know the end, I know the end of the principal characters, and I know the major turning points and events from the books, the climaxes for each book, but I don't necessarily know each twist and turn along the way. That's something I discover in the course of writing and that's what makes writing enjoyable. I think if I outlined comprehensively and stuck to the outline the actual writing would be boring.

I write any sort of rubbish which will cover the main outlines of the story, then I can begin to see it.

It's true that some of us become better writers by living long enough. But this is also how we become worse writers. The trick is to die in between.

There is no such thing as writer's block for writers whose standards are low enough.

When I sit down to write a novel I do not at all know, and I do not very much care, how it is to end.

Working on the plot/story idea for my next novel ... It always takes time.

You grow a whole lot more as a writer by getting old stories out of the house and letting new ones come in and live with you until they grow up and are ready to go. Don't let the old ones stay there and grow fat and cranky and eat all the food out of the refrigerator. You have dozens of generations of stories inside you, but the only way to make room for the new ones is to write the old ones and mail them off.

Beginning a novel is always hard. It feels like going nowhere. I always have to write at least 100 pages that go into the trashcan before it finally begins to work. It's discouraging, but necessary to write those pages. I try to consider them pages -100 to zero of the novel.

When writing a novel, I'm not smart enough to know how to foreshadow something if I don't know what it is.

I don't begin a novel until I have written, not just the last sentence, but usually, as a result thereof, many of the surrounding final paragraphs, so that in addition to knowing what happens, I know what the voice is.

The mental state I'm in is completely different, but the act of trying to write is the same. I mean, in all instances you try to write good sentences. But in a novel you're free to do whatever you want, and in the autobiographical works you can't make things up.

What I try to do with any of my stories, any of my novels, is make them feel very original.

If you try to nail anything down, in the novel, either it kills the novel, or the novel gets up and walks away with the nail.

I might spend 100 pages trying to get to know the world I'm writing about: its contours, who are my main characters, what are their relationships to each other, and just trying to get a sense of what and who this book is about. Usually around that point of 100 pages, I start to feel like I'm lost, I have too much material, it's time to start making some choices. It's typically at that point that I sit down and try to make a formal outline and winnow out what's not working and what I'm most interested in, where the story seems to be going.

I've always relied on producing more material than I need. With each of my published novels I've written around four times the amount of material that's ended up in the book.

you must not come lightly to the blank page.