Bruce Coville Quotes

I tend to start books with a very broad outline, but I always leave room for happy accidents. With 'The Passenger,' there were perhaps too many of those.

SOON was the first novel where I used a rough outline. Usually I have characters and an idea and write as a process of discovery. Like working without a net.

I really don't know what I am going to do in terms of what a book is going to be about until I actually start writing it!

I don't necessarily start with the beginning of the book. I just start with the part of the story that's most vivid in my imagination and work forward and backward from there.

I don't have a plan for a story when I sit down to write. I would get quite bored carrying it out.

I'm often asked how I write books, but I don't think my approach is suitable for everyone. If I walked into a creative writing class, all I could say to them was 'I tend to make it up as I go along.' I'm not sure that's brilliant advice.

Every kind of book I've written has been written in a different way. There has not been any set time for writing, any set way, I haven't re-invented the process every time but I almost have.

No ideas are harmed in the making of my books, by the way. All I do with my best ideas is run with them, fast as I can, taking notes and occasionally suggesting a left hand turn rather than the right hand one which might have taken us both over a precipice.

I make extensive outlines before I write a book. I usually know what will happen. I know the characters, and I know what they are about.

People ask me how I do research for my science fiction. The answer is, I never do any research.

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.

It makes more sense to write one big book - a novel or nonfiction narrative - than to write many stories or essays. Into a long, ambitious project you can fit or pour all you possess and learn.

I always have a basic plot outline, but I like to leave some things to be decided while I write.

My rule has always been, write the next part of the book that you seem to know well. So I won't necessarily write chapter two after chapter one.

I do not outline. There are writers I know and count as my friends who certainly do it the other way, but for me, part of the adventure is not knowing how it's going to turn out.

'For Whom the Bell Tolls' was a problem which I carried on each day. I knew what was going to happen in principle. But I invented what happened each day I wrote.

When I start writing a novel, I have no sense of direction, no idea, really nothing.

Sometimes some of these little side excursions are useful and I manage to fit them in the book somewhere.

Anybody can do research. The plotting of the novel, writing the ending before you write anything else, which I always do - I don't know that everybody can do that. That's the hard part.

I really enjoy the writing process because I can do it from my house. I can create these characters and take them in the different directions that I want to take them. You have a lot of freedom as a writer.

I never know what's going to happen in a novel. I don't have a plan or an outline.

I am a very linear thinker, so I write beginning to end. I write hundreds of pages per book that never make it into print.

Each book I've done somehow finds its own unique form, a specific way it has to be written, and once I find it, I stick with it.

I think a conceptual idea comes to me first - something I've been mulling over a lot right before I feel like writing a book - and then the characters start to develop around it.

I start with a character and a situation, but I don't know what's going to happen until I write it. Sometimes things happen that surprise me.