Patricia Reilly Giff Quotes

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.

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

My own books drive themselves. I know roughly where a book is going to end, but essentially the story develops under my fingers. It's just a matter of joining the dots.

The way that I write novels in particular is I don't usually outline; I just write. Part of the fun is discovering what's happening in the story as I'm going along.

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

I don't really like to just sit down at a computer and write, because that tends to be a little forced.

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.

One of the big breakthroughs I had as a writer was when I stopped agonising over every word.

I've just been writing stuff down as it comes to me. I haven't thought, 'Let me write some major opus here.'

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

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 envy those writers who outline their novels, who know where they're going. But I find writing is a process of discovery.

I never start out with any kind of connecting theme or plan. Everything just falls the way it falls. I don't ever think about what kind of fiction I write or what I am writing about or what I am trying to write about. When I'm writing, what I do is I think about a story that I want to tell.

I don't work in a straight line. I don't write with an outline. I write where I can see things happen, and then things get glued together.

The process is different for every book, but there are similarities. I always draw from the inside out. I don't plot them ahead of time, and I'm always surprised by things that happen in my books.

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

And once I know what the first page is, then the rest will come.

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.

'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.

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.

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

I have heard of novels started in the middle, at the end, written in patches to be joined together later, but I have never felt the slightest desire to do this.

If you're writing a novel, you're in a room for three or four years. There's not much coming in from the outside.