Diana Gabaldon Quotes

I wish to God I was organized enough to tell you that, 'Yes, there will be 14 books, and this one will go here, and that one will go there'... but to be honest, I hardly know what I'm going to do when I get up in the morning.

Writers get embarrassed sometimes in talking about how much fun writing can be, but drafting is often really enjoyable. Often, you're tumbling in the dark, and you don't know where the story is going to lead.

I always say that, for me, writing a book is like a wacky Greyhound bus trip - I know where I'm starting and where I'll end up, but I have no idea what will happen along the way.

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

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

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

I don't think in terms of projects.

I just write what comes along. I don't have a detailed master plan.

Honest to God, for me, I've never been a guy to stack projects. A lot of these other guys, they like to do this and then line up what they're doing next and line up what they're doing next. I just can't do it.

I don't really plan too much ahead when I write, because otherwise, I get kind of bored.

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.

You can't have an organised life and a five year plan and be an actor.

My general writing preface is to write an outline and then ignore about half of it, both on a micro level with the individual book, and on a macro level with the series as a whole, and that's pretty much what's happened.

I try to know as much as I can about a book before the beginning, but I never know exactly where it's going to end.

For all my longer works (i.e. the novels) I write chapter outlines so I can have the pleasure of departing from them later on.

I don't plan my books. I don't know what's going to happen. That's why I could pick up any one of my 30 books and I could continue the story on.

I hate outlines. I have a broad sense of where the story is going; I know the end, I know the end of the principal characters, and I know the major turning points and events from the books, the climaxes for each book, but I don't necessarily know each twist and turn along the way. That's something I discover in the course of writing and that's what makes writing enjoyable. I think if I outlined comprehensively and stuck to the outline the actual writing would be boring.

It kind of varies according to what I'm doing and what my situation is, but, most of the time, I have no idea what I'm doing until the day of.

I don't really like to say, 'This is where I'll be in five years,' because I truly have no idea.

I didn't really have a road map ever.

Even though I know I can work out at any point in my day, I set a time that I want to get this workout in by. I set times when I'm waking up and having breakfast. Finding a few things you can stick to in your daily routine is helpful when there's a lot of uncertainty and your scheduling is really off.

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.

My father was very methodical about life. He'd always ask me, 'Now, what's your system? What's your schedule like?' I have no big system, no rigid schedule. When he would ask, 'How do you do this? Give it to me step by step,' I'd try to convince him that there were no step-by-steps.