H. P. Lovecraft Quotes

I make extensive outlines before I write a book. I usually know what will happen. I know the characters, and I know what they are about.

I want to wake up one morning and know how to write page one, or page 10, or page 250. But I never seem to know how to do it. Every book is different and takes a different structure, style, process, etc. And relearning how to write is where the insanity comes from.

My writing process is such that a story will be in my head for awhile, and I'll start making notes on my computer. I create character sheets that include a character's past, fears, goals and ambitions.

I don't ever want to impose something on the story. I want the story to tell me.

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 tend to write my beginnings and endings first - as a cartoonist and storyteller, I couldn't sit down every day if I didn't know where the story was headed.

I'll write maybe one long paragraph describing the events, then a page or two breaking the events into chapters, and then reams of pages delving into my characters. After that, I'm ready to begin.

And I don't want to begin something, I don't want to write that first sentence until all the important connections in the novel are known to me. As if the story has already taken place, and it's my responsibility to put it in the right order to tell it to you.

I am a writer who works from an outline. What I generally do when I build an outline is I find focal, important scenes, and I build them in my head and I don't write them yet, but I build towards them.

When I'm putting a story together, I generally know the ending and a couple of the points halfway through, and I've got sort of an idea about the beginning, and although I do write the story one sentence at a time, when I'm thinking it up, I'm thinking it up all at once.

I plot the first 5 or 6 chapters quite minutely, and also the end. So I know where I am going but not how I'm going to get there, which gives characters the chance to develop organically, as happens in real life as you get to know a person.

The trouble with telling a good story is that it invariably reminds the other fellow of a dull one.

When I first began to have the initial idea for 'Heartsease,' I just wrote a skeleton story; that is, I started her off as this young, bright 16-year-old and then added the events that occurred and where she and other characters fitted in, even writing 3 different endings, as I was not sure where Mary's story would lead to.

I would fix other people's lines if they asked me on occasion. The hard part of writing is the architecture of it, getting the story and structuring it. Not the tweaking of lines.

When I'm writing the first draft, I'm writing in a very slovenly way: anything to get the outline of the story on paper.

Plotting is difficult for me, and always has been. I do that before I actually start writing, but I always do characters, and the arc of the story, first... You can't do anything without a story arc. Where is it going to begin, where will it end.

For me, the hardest thing in the world is how to start a book.

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.

I don't always write in order, so composing multi-book stories could get complicated.

What comes to me always is a character, a scene, a moment. That's going to be the beginning. Then, as I write, I begin to perceive an ending. I begin to see a destination, although sometimes that changes. And then, of course, there's the whole middle section looming.

The story was such that I couldn't make a graceful ending and then make a graceful new beginning. I could have, but I didn't want to. So, it isn't the most graceful way of writing a story. This new story is, I think, is pretty good stuff. I'm pleased with it anyway.

When I start writing a novel, I have no sense of direction, no idea, really nothing.

I asked Ring Lardner the other day how he writes his short stories, and he said he wrote a few widely separated words or phrases on a piece of paper and then went back and filled in the spaces.

It's not that I ever sat down and outlined a trilogy, but I always have a sense of what size an idea is when I start it.

The bane of my existence is the synopses that publishers request for a new novel or series. That's where I'm really producing fiction - my final book never ends up looking like the synopsis.