"I don't think ... I have to show you, here, the relationship between archery and the writer's art.  I have already warned against thinking on targets."

"My books are always a process of discovery.  I almost never have any idea what I'm doing until I'm actually doing it.  In fact, I think every time I've had a plan or an idea, it has been entirely sidelined by whatever I uncover while writing."

"Remember: Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations.  Plot is observed after the fact rather than before.  It cannot precede action.  It is the chart that remains when an action is through.  That is all Plot ever should be.  It is human desire let run, running, and reach a goal.  It cannot be mechanical.  It can only be dynamic."

"We never want to force our story into our idea of how it should be structured. Our original impulse was valid. We can trust it and return to it over and over again, even as the story continues to be reshaped."

"I don't like formulas.  I don't like novels where I know the ending halfway through."

"No one could say that [Stephen King's] work is short of storytelling, but he plots very little."

"This is why virtually all inexperienced writers end up in their heads instead of the unconscious: because the unconscious is scary as hell. It is hell for many of us."

"There are broadly two ways to approach any piece of writing, in my opinion. One is where you have an idea of where the whole thing is heading ... The other is where you have a phrase, an image, maybe a single line that fascinates you and provokes you into elaborating it."

"In hesitation is thought.  In delay comes the effort for a style, instead of leaping upon truth which is the only style worth deadfalling or tiger-trapping."

"The way you'll know that you're writing from your head [rather than from your intuition] is that you'll look at your story and find it full of abstraction and generalization and summary and analysis and interpretation."

"We never want our idea of our story to get in the way of letting our characters live." (artist)

"Literature—language, fiction—does not as a medium force you to leave your ideas behind. And if you think it into being, if you will a story into being, by God, it's going to show."

"Outlines help some writers organize their thoughts.  But outlines imprison others and keep them from thinking clearly."

"Most writers will create an outline and start pounding out a draft.  But Klinkenborg does neither.  Outlines, he says, are not only a waste of time, but they also harm our writing.  How, he wonders, can we presume to know what we're going to write before we write it?"

"Listen to the story being told.  Come up with the idea, but let it play out naturally.  Try not to shape it word for word or be so married to an outline that you deny what could become something amazing."

"I was a real outliner... the real price was, the writing was always boring, because I had already mapped out what I was going to say.  There was no energy left, and no excitement left in the prose itself."

"I don't plot anything out.  I don't have an outline, for better or for worse.  I've tried, but I feel that kind of hems me in."

(written by Robert Olen Butler)

"You're much closer to the dreaming side of your mind when you write.  Dream, dream, dream it through.  Write more with your body and less with your head.  Don't think a story through, don't think it out.  The danger of thinking it through is that most of us are not smart enough to do it that way.  We have to go one moment at a time."