"Writing is like skiing - you will fall when you hesitate."
"Do not reduce your story to outlines and sketches, notes and 3x5 cards. You will make your story finite this way and it will suffer because it cannot grow beyond your outline."
"Let some stuff that you think is interesting drop away."
These quotes are from Advice for Writers by David L. Robbins.
"You Are Enough"
"Work With What You're Given"
"Writing Begets Writing"
These quotes are from The Three Cosmic Rules of Writing by Dennis Palumbo.
5 comments:
Love that cartoon!
I would disagree with Robbins on the outlines and sketches. They can serve as foundations rather than walls. I've outlined my book but on a constant basis my characters are jumping outside the lines, building their own structures all over the foundation I originally created.
It's a good writer's argument though--outline or not outline? I'm always interested reading about which authors use them and those who don't. It all boils down to thinking and learning patterns in the long run.
Yeah, right now I'm struggling with the opposite problem - Finding that basic scene sketches still leave a scene wide open to the point of indecision -- and it's that indecision that is a killer for me.
When my students ask me what it's like to write a novel, chapter by chapter, I tell them what I heard another writer once say (in my words): "It's like driving from St. Petersburg to Miami at night -- you only can see as far as the headlights."
Thanks... good Post (made me think),
Bill
I agree with you, Crystallyn. I don't have that talent of being able to wing it, and I don't find outlines at all confining. In fact, I'm usually pretty anal about having a certain structure in my stories that need planning to work.
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