Outlining A Novel Quotes

But the reason that writers like Harlan and Lee don't outline is that they enjoy the serendipity, the surprises that arise when they're not constricted by the steel girdle of an outline. And I get that too. Some of the best plot twists in my work have been ones that I didn't plan on, including the ending to PARANOIA. One of the great pleasures of writing fiction is living in the story so that you "experience" it the way your characters do. ~ Joseph Finder

I have tried to outline, but all that seems to guarantee is that the book will not much resemble the outline, so I long ago stopped. I never really know where a book is going, and each new book has it's own voice - and I have to be available to hear it. That's what can be frustrating between novels - the way I wrote any previous book won't work with this one. I'll make notes, do little sketches of characters or places, but every new book has to be discovered, and maps to the older books won't help much. ~ Daniel Woodrell

is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. THE ~ Brandon Sanderson

Writing is the main gig and teaching and performing are sidelines, an excuse for not writing more. Working on a novel and on an opera make me seriously want to retire and find a volunteer job as a docent at the zoo explaining to schoolchildren where frogs go in the winter. ~ Garrison Keillor

It's not always about writing more words or drinking more coffee. Sometimes getting to the end of a novel simply takes remembering that the world is more complicated than we know, and then sticking some of those complications into the story. ~ Scott Westerfeld

William Goldman's Marathon Man was a novel that taught me about suspense. I was maybe 16 years old when I read it and I remember thinking, "You could put a gun to my head and I wouldn't put this book down." I loved that feeling - and want to give it others. ~ Harlan Coben

Out of an intuitive experience of the world comes a continuous flow of novel distinctions. Purely rational understanding, on the other hand, serves to confirm old mindsets, rigid categories. Artists, who live in the same world as the rest of us, steer clear of these mindsets to make us see things anew. ~ Ellen Langer

Initially I only decided to try and write a novel because I wasn't getting enough screenwriting work. It wasn't a long-held ambition, and certainly the idea came first. ~ Stef Penney

I have lived for a long time inside a series of coincidences that most people would find implausible in a novel. ~ Alexander Chee

A novel is a collision of ideas. Three or four threads may be floating around in the writer's consciousness, and at a single moment in time, these ideas collide and produce a novel. ~ Anita Shreve

The shock was akin to that of buying, out of duty, a novel written by a dull and uninspired acquaintance and finding there passages of heartrending beauty and rapture that one could never imagine coming from such a tedious person. ~ Andrew Sean Greer

It is not glamorous that I can't drive a car. It is not mysterious to be home on a Saturday night, reading a novel in a pile of smelly golden retrievers. However, I am not immune to the feeling of being viewed as a mystery, as a Sinclair, as part of a privileged clan of special people, and as part of a magical, important narrative, just because I am part of this clan. My mother is not immune to it, either. This is who we have been brought up to be. Sinclairs. Sinclairs. ~ E. Lockhart

There is such malice, treachery, and dissimulation, even among professed friends and intimate companions, as cannot fail to strike a virtuous mind with horror; and when Vice quits the stage for a moment, her place is immediately occupied by Folly... ~ Tobias Smollett

Really, Beliefs have the power to create and the power to destroy ... Human beings have the awesome ability to take any experience of their lives and create a meaning that dis-empowers them or one that can literally save their lives ...
gone through many different phases of Destines and that's what made me to pen down ... hope it won't screw-up me again ...
Something beyond love ... ~ Atul Purohit

Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days. ~ Richard Wright

A novel it's different. It's kind of exhilarating not to have to cut to the bone constantly. Oh, well I can go over here for a moment. I can say what I think the guy was thinking or what the day looked like or what the bird was doing. If you do that as a playwright, you're dead. ~ David Mamet

It would be easier to write a novel without reader input, but I feel the fiction is richer for it. ~ Piers Anthony

I didn't have a list of things I should do this year, next year, find a good novel, sign two stars and make a deal - because I think cinema should come from cinema. I never adapted anything. Beautiful books are beautiful books, that's it. I don't know why we should transform them. ~ Agnes Varda

The first inkling of this notion had come to him the Christmas before, at his daughter's place in Vermont. On Christmas Eve, as indifferent evening took hold in the blue squares of the windows, he sat alone in the crepuscular kitchen, imbued with a profound sense of the identity of winter and twilight, of twilight and time, of time and memory, of his childhood and that church which on this night waited to celebrate the second greatest of its feasts. For a moment or an hour as he sat, become one with the blue of the snow and the silence, a congruity of star, cradle, winter, sacrament, self, it was as though he listened to a voice that had long been trying to catch his attention, to tell him, Yes, this was the subject long withheld from him, which he now knew, and must eventually act on.

He had managed, though, to avoid it. He only brought it out now to please his editor, at the same time aware that it wasn't what she had in mind at all. But he couldn't do better; he had really only the one subject, if subject was the word for it, this idea of a notion or a holy thing growing clear in the stream of time, being made manifest in unexpected ways to an assortment of people: the revelation itself wasn't important, it could be anything, almost. Beyond that he had only one interest, the seasons, which he could describe endlessly and with all the passion of a country-bred boy grown old in the city. He was beginning to doubt (he said) whether these were sufficient to make an ~ John Crowley

The men and women, the weapons, the deerhunt all make a huge and fragile danger in John Bolger's novel The Hunters. There is care and harm in this book and all written with felicitous and steady grace. ~ Ron Carlson

THE INSANITY PLEA A Novel Larry D. Thompson ~ Larry D. Thompson

What could there be in this document written by a young girl in 1917? ~ Peter J. Tanous

Whether your audience is in a sweaty basement club or nestled in a favourite armchair, good money has been paid, and attention has got to be grabbed if you are not to be heckled off the stage or find your novel discarded in favour of the latest volume of 'Fifty Shades of Whatever.' ~ Mark Billingham

Long before 'Diary of a Wimpy Kid', 'Dork Diaries', and the graphic novel explosion, only a small press like Tricycle was willing to take a risk on such an innovative format. ~ Marissa Moss

Tess is not simply presented as a passive victim, however. Throughout the novel she is shown as experiencing tension between the intractable materiality of the social and economic world in which she has to live, and her extraordinarily vulnerable, sensitive self. Hardy is particularly interested in the nature of her consciousness, and in the intense subjectivity of her experience. ~ Geoffrey Harvey

She opened her eyes and looked into his rather intensely.
"What?" Alex asked.
"This cannot be."
"What can't be?" Alex asked her, more bafflement in his voice this time.
"I have been reading people all my life. I can even read cats and dogs. I've been doing it all my life and i've been here longer than the two of you put together."
"And?" Alex wanted to get to the point. Whatever the truth may be, he just wanted to hear it, wanted it on the table before them so he could get this over with and they can go home.
"AND ... you are the first person that has nothing for me to see."
"And here I was hoping you'd say I'd win the lottery or get married to a supermodel or something." Alex said, starting to laugh.
"You don't understand. I don't see anything, anything at all. There is nothing to you, nothing but what I see before me."
"So ... what does that mean?"
"It means you don't exist. ~ J.C. Joranco

Writing a novel is a lot like reading one. ~ Katherine Center

But, if one cuts more deeply, the lonesome dove is Newt, a lonely teenager who is the unacknowledged son of Captain Call and a kindly whore named Maggie, who is now dead. So the central theme of the novel is not the stocking of Montana but unacknowledged paternity. All of the Hat Creek Outfit, including particularly Augustus McCrae, want Call to accept the boy as his son. ~ Larry McMurtry

The novel form is about the protagonist's struggle to transform his arbitrary, fragmented, given experience into a narrative as meaningful as his favorite books. ~ Elif Batuman

The theologian is interested specifically in the modern novel because there he sees reflected the man of our time, the unbeliever, who is nevertheless grappling in a desperate and usually honest way with intense problems of the spirit. ~ Flannery O'Connor

1. Sometimes music is needed.
2. Sometimes silence.
3. A novel, like all written things, is a piece of music, the language demanding you make a sound as you read it. Writing one, then, is like remembering a song you've never heard before. ~ Alexander Chee

You never finish writing a novel, you eventually abandon it. ~ Tom Winton

Poison Pill is a great reading. The novel ranges from Russian oligarchs to the American worlds of drug research and the equity markets, all of it in a mode of high suspense. ~ Scott Turow

The book that made a lasting impression was the one my mother gave each of us when she decided we were ready for our first 'adult novel,' Lucy Maud Montgomery's 'The Blue Castle.' ~ Hallie Ephron

A young friend of mine has written a rather surprising little novel about this; about in its way. About the extent to which we're able to penetrate the looking-glass and imagine a life, indeed a consciousness, that goes some way to reduce the blind spots in our own. It's a novel that on the surface would seem to have nothing to do with its author, but in fact is a kind of veiled portrait of someone determined to transcend her provenance, her privilege, her naivete. ~ Lisa Halliday

A story that is more interesting than any novel written by Nicolas Spark; a relationship that has more emotions than any movie made by Karan Johar; and a drama that is more exciting than any TV show...this what we have in our 15 years of marriage and 19 years of togetherness (?)... ~ Sandhya Jane

They both closed their eyes and fell asleep in each other's arms. For one night, it was as if their lives were normal and for a few hours they could forget about the rest of the world. ~ Jason Medina

Sick children inevitably become arrested: You are fated to live out your days as the child you were when diagnosed, the child who believes there is a life after a novel ends. ~ John Green

It took me the bulk of my twenties to write one book about a family of alligator wrestlers. Whereas somebody like Steve Martin is releasing his latest banjo symphony, having just completed another movie and acclaimed, best-selling novel. ~ Karen Russell