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Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you're doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing. -- E. L. Doctorow
I spend about eight months researching and outlining my book. -- Jeffery Deaver
Commas in The New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim. -- E. B. White
I spend eight months outlining and researching the novel before I begin to write a single word of the prose. -- Jeffery Deaver
Outlining is like putting on training wheels. It gives me the courage to write, but we always go off the outline. -- Hallie Ephron
I don't like outlining, because books are organic things. Sometimes a book doesn't want to be written in a certain way. -- Sara Gruen
Outlining is not writing. Coming up with ideas is not writing. Researching is not writing. Creating characters is not writing. Only writing is writing. -- Harlan Coben
If I spend a year and a half writing a script, the first year will be outlining in notebooks. It's just the way I work, definitely not necessarily the best way. -- Rian Johnson
The Founding Fathers envisioned a federal government that trusts its people with their money and freedom, outlining this limited, non-intrusive federal government in...the Constitution, leaving the other powers to people...or to the states. -- Milton Friedman
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama's strategy is to lead from behind. It sounds like what he is outlining is not to lead at all. We cannot continue to outsource foreign policy. We must lead. We are the most powerful nation in the world. We need to begin to act like it, again. -- Marco Rubio
Once you play with these scenes and you're outlining it, again and again, and telling each other the narrative, and telling it to people you know, trying to make sure that the mathematics of the story work, you feel that those are in place, and the actual writing and final draft doesn't take as long. -- Brit Marling
I am always worried that over-planning and outlining will kill the magic of writing; most of the world I created in 'California' occurred via good old sexy sentence-making. -- Edan Lepucki
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. -- Cynthia Voigt
In the pre-production process, I am emailing with the actors or jumping on the phone, and we're sort of figuring out who the characters are and trying to build the relationship dynamic and things like that. Then, also, I am outlining. -- Joe Swanberg
I am a hopeless pantser, so I don't do much outlining. A thought will occur to me, and I'll just throw it into the story. I tell myself I'll worry about untangling it later. I'm glad no one sees my first drafts except for my poor editor and agent. -- Marie Lu
The benefit of this kind of outlining is that you discover a story's flaws before you invest a lot of time writing the first draft, and it's almost impossible to get stuck at a difficult chapter, because you've already done the work to push through those kinds of blocks. -- George Stephen
Picasso's superhuman gift for draftsmanship might have made him lazy about pursuing the full potential of color. It was not unusual for him to build a composition by first outlining figures and objects in black and then filling the interstices in a perfunctory manner that can put one in mind of a museum-shop coloring book. -- Martin Filler
Showing the addiction and unusual sexual practices are ways of just outlining a much bigger character trait. -- James Franco

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