Prewriting Quotes

The actual writing time is a lot shorter than the thinking time.

I must write the book out in my head now, before I sit down.

I'm a great planner, so before I ever write chapter 1, I work out what happens in every chapter and who the characters are. I usually spend a year on the outline.

Much of the activity we think of as writing is, actually, getting ready to write.

I won't usually just sit down to write. I'd have done it in my head already. I visualise a story just like a film strip running in my head. I guess that is also a reason why my books have such a visual element to them. And it's what I tell young writers: plan your story ahead.

Lester del Rey told me repeatedly that the first and most important part of writing fiction is just to think about the story. Don't write anything down. Don't try to pull anything together right away. Just dream for a while and see what happens. There isn't any timetable involved, no measuring stick for how long it ought to take. For each book, it is different. But that period of thinking, of reflection, is crucial to how successful your story will turn out to be.

Most writing doesn’t take place on the page; it takes place in your head.

If you do enough planning before you start to write, there's no way you can have writer's block. I do a complete chapter by chapter outline.

I'm a big fan of outlining. Here's the theory: If I outline, then I can see the mistakes I'm liable to make. They come out more clearly in the outline than they do in the pages.

Spend more time working before you write page one. Then, the story - at least parts of it - will feel as though it is writing itself.

To a certain extent I imagine a play is completely finished in my mind - in my case, at any rate - without my knowing it, before I sit down to write.

By the time I sit down ready to write, I've done a lot of longhand and a lot of note collecting along the way.

After preliminary research, I zero in on an idea, and then I spend at least four months exploring the topic and in plot-building. I jot down every single detail of the plot as bullet points per chapter, and only when the skeleton is complete do I start writing.

I am a great believer that all the primary research has to be done before principle writing begins. I'm a huge advocate of plotting.

Before writing, I start with a series of questions, specific things I need to know before I can write the book... That list grows and changes as I do more and more research. But when I've answered the bulk of the questions, I begin to write.