David McCullough Quotes

The writing process, it's too mysterious to try and describe.

I spend about eight months researching and outlining my book.

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

When I write a book, I write very cleanly from page one to the last page. I hardly ever write out of sequence.

I like to have a title before I start writing.

I love the structural part of the writing process.

Normally, I spend a week on the outline and take two weeks to write the book.

Outlining is not writing. Coming up with ideas is not writing. Researching is not writing. Creating characters is not writing. Only writing is writing.

The minimum I need is six months to allow for dithering, procrastination and the research. The research times varies from book to book; some are faster because they're based off resources I have at my disposal.

I write everything out in longhand in one fast go. And then I throw out the first few and start over again. By the end of the first draft, the whole thing's messy and disgusting and horrible, but you really understand the foundational stuff.

When I had worked on my first book, I had readily shown bits and pieces to everyone - for encouragement, to force myself to write.

I outline and outline and outline, and then I'm very specific about the stuff I write. That's my process.

What about writing it first and rationalizing it afterwards?

I write very quickly; I rewrite very slowly. It takes me nearly as long to rewrite a book as it does to get the first draft.

I spend about a year between novels.

The outline is 95 percent of the book. Then I sit down and write, and that's the easy part.

Basically I started to jot notes, lots of faxes back and forth to my writer, we faxed ideas throughout the whole first draft, and started all over again.

Each of my books took roughly one and a half years to write. Some may have taken a shorter time to write the draft and a longer time to revise, while others were the opposite.

I'm publicizing the book that's done. I'm writing the book that's in the hopper, and I'm doing a little advance research on the book to come.

Writing takes a lot of patience. It usually takes me a year to write a book. One time, it took me 14 years to write a book, not that I worked on it every day.

There are many challenges I face while working on a book. Working within deadlines and schedules is certainly one of the bigger ones for me. I want to create the best possible book I can for my readers with words and pictures - and that takes time to get it just right.

Only towards the end of this process are any of the chapters in fully readable condition, a state of affairs that used to alarm my wife. But Joan's got used to it.

When it comes to sermon writing, generally there are two problems. Some preachers love the research stage but hate the writing, and they start writing too late. Others don't like doing research, so they move way too fast to the writing part.

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 really have reached a point where I can write a book about all of this.