One more tidbit from the interview with Elmore Leonard in the book, The Tenacity of a Cockroach, this time about planning--or rather NOT planning a novel. The interviewer (Keith Phipps) said, "I take it that you don't work from a tight outline." Leonard replied:
"I don't even have a loose outline. I just make it up as I go along. E. L. Doctorow says you write the book to find out what it's about. I sure agree with that. He says it's like following your headlights driving at night down a country road. You can't see where you're going, but you get there."
Of course this approach sometimes has drawbacks, as Leonard agrees: "There are a couple [of books] where I went with the wrong character. In Pronto, I went with the character who, when I was writing about it, was my age, 67. When he got about 100 pages in, he was in character, but I lost interest in him, because he was getting hard to get along with. He was drinking again, and it all added to the plot, but I didn't care much for the guy anymore. I had to bring another character on, who wasn't introduced until page 40, this guy Raylan Givens, the federal marshal in Kentucky. I could write a book about him anytime. I made him a lot more important and opened the next book, Riding the Rap, with Raylan. So I gave him his due."
For what it's worth, I've found a hybrid approach to plotting novels the most useful: wing it for the first quarter of the book, then outline the rest of it.
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