Tawni O'Dell Quotes

When I begin to write a story, I usually know how things will end. It's the journey toward that point I must discover. The process is sometimes painful, but also exciting.

I feel like you just need to keep writing until the writing itself just begins to take shape.

I never outline. I don't work from an outline. I have no idea where the book is going. I mean, even two-thirds of the way through, I don't know how it's going to end.

As far as personal philosophies go, I think you should know your ending. I know that's radically different from a lot of other writers who just organically like to find the story. Other than that, I try different things and mess around. I'm still just playing a good bit.

The process of creation goes on all the time. When I get through, I feel I know what the character will do in every situation. But the building up of the part is not mechanical or deliberate. It grows out of the text.

When I sit down to write, I don't have any real goals except to follow one good sentence with another... I'm not the kind of writer who has a map.

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

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

When I sat down and wrote the first paragraph, I was like, 'Oh, I can go with this.' I didn't do an outline. I didn't do anything. I just wrote sentence by sentence, not knowing where the story was going.

I've always figured the only way I could finish a book and get a plot was just to keep making it longer and longer until something happens - you know, until it finds its own plot - because you can't outline and then fit the thing into it. I suppose it's a slow way of working.

While I had no intention of ending the series after 'The Spellmans Strike Again,' I did close many doors in that book and, with the fifth one, I was opening a lot of doors and not finding anything behind them and then opening another door and another until I found something. It was a while before I found my stride.

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

I write linearly without knowing the full story. I discover it as I write it.

I don't write with an outline. I don't often know what I'm going to do as I'm writing. And I do everything by feel and by instinct.

Because I don’t work with an outline, writing a story is like crossing a stream, now I’m on this rock, now I’m on this rock, now I’m on this rock.

I know very few writers who outline fully before they start. It just doesn't seem possible to do, because so many things don't come out until you're absolutely knee-deep in the world.

A lot of time you write out of some unconscious place. I try to trust what is coming and where it wants to take me.

When I started the 'Broken Empire' trilogy, I thought it was a short story, and I didn't know the beginning, middle, or end of even that.

I always say, and I truly believe this, that my work is three steps ahead of me. I have an idea for something and I tend to feel like it's leading me and I'll follow the process through, and it's not until after I've seen it that I truly understand why I'm doing this.

One of the things I had to learn as a writer was to trust the act of writing. To put myself in the position of writing to find out what I was writing. I did that with 'World's Fair,' as with all of them. The inventions of the book come as discoveries.

You write a book, and after 50 pages you think it's about one thing, and then you write another hundred and you realize it's about something else, and then by the time you're done, you can look back and say, 'Oh, this is what it's about.'

I suspect there are two kinds of novelists. Those who have a point of view and have something to say and then write a novel in order to say that thing, and those of us who write the book in order to find out what we think about that thing.

I'm a writer who simply can't know what I'm writing about until the writing lets me discover it. In a sense, my writing process embraces the gapped nature of my memory process, leaping across spaces that represent all I've lost and establishing fresh patterns within all that remains.

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 consider creativity to be a more non-rational, subconscious thing. You have a relationship to your creativity - you can feed it with content, with some rational prodding and sleep and things like that, but the mechanisms by which your creativity work are largely unknown.