Color in certain places has the great value of making the outlines and structural planes seem more energetic.
Commas in The New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim.
The outline is 95 percent of the book. Then I sit down and write, and that's the easy part.
The more work you put in on your outline and getting the skeleton of your story right, the easier the process is later.
When I pictured myself, it was always like just an outline in a colouring book, with the inside not yet completed.
I'm a regular guy; I like well-defined outlines. I'm old-fashioned, bourgeois.
I never know what's going to happen in a novel. I don't have a plan or an outline.
Coaches who can outline plays on a black board are a dime a dozen. The ones who win get inside their player and motivate.
Hope was always out ahead of fact, possibility obscured the outlines of reality.
Both slaves had been oiled until their flesh shined like polished ebony, outlining every detail of their muscles.
The outlines of the needed psychology of becoming can be discovered by looking within ourselves; for it is knowledge of our own uniqueness that supplies the first, and probably the best, hints for acquiring orderly knowledge of others.
When I'm writing the first draft, I'm writing in a very slovenly way: anything to get the outline of the story on paper.
I cannot outline. I do not know what the next thing is going to happen in the book until it comes out of my fingers.
I don't like outlining, because books are organic things. Sometimes a book doesn't want to be written in a certain way.
Outlines are the last resource of bad fiction writers who wish to God they were writing masters' theses.
I went to this tattoo parlor in the East Village and I got an outline of a violin on my lower back. They call them tramp stamps now.
Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you're doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.
For the novels I wrote before selling anything, I didn't outline much. I had a vague idea of the story.
Outlining is not writing. Coming up with ideas is not writing. Researching is not writing. Creating characters is not writing. Only writing is writing.
I envy those writers who outline their novels, who know where they're going. But I find writing is a process of discovery.
I always have a basic plot outline, but I like to leave some things to be decided while I write.
