Nathaniel Philbrick Quotes

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

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.

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

I don't set out to write something. I more just write, and later on, I discover what it's about.

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

I don't pare down much. I write the beginning of a story in a notebook and it comes out very close to what it will be in the end. There is not much deliberateness about it.

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.

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.

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.

I don't write with a scheme or a plan. I write word to word, so whatever that first sentence is, having said that, one more or less had to say what comes next and next and next. Guilty of no cogitation or forethought.

I don't card out my screenplays ever. I just have an idea I just sit down and write I don't edit.

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'm definitely a seat-of-the-pants writer.

My writing process isn't a very organized thing.

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 really don't keep an outline; I don't organize in any way. I just write.

I am very spontaneous when I write; it kind of just comes out. I never think about what I'm going to write about first... it just sort of comes out like word vomit.

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.

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 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.

I never sit down and write. I just sorta let things form in my brain.

My best stories come out of nowhere, with no concern for form at all.

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