No outlines, ever. Well, except for that synopsis my publisher always insists on. But I consider those necessary evils, and when I begin writing I’ve… - Caitlín R. Kiernan

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No outlines, ever. Well, except for that synopsis my publisher always insists on. But I consider those necessary evils, and when I begin writing I’ve usually forgotten whatever was in them. Hardly ever does a novel of mine turn out bearing any real semblance to those synopses. That’s part of the business of publishing, not a part of the process of writing. But why do I avoid outlines, well that gets back to writing at a sentence level. The story has not occurred until I write it. Only those broad strokes can exist in my mind and possess any inherent validity. “This will be a story set on Mars, and it’s about a woman looking for her lost lover.” That’s the best I can ever hope for, and I’ve learned that, and I don’t try to force anything more detailed.

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About Caitlín R. Kiernan

Caitlín Rebekah Kiernan (born 26 May 1964) is an Irish-born American author, paleontologist, and prolific blogger perhaps most famous for the novels The Drowning Girl: A Memoir and The Red Tree. Kiernan is a two-time recipient of both the World Fantasy and Bram Stoker awards.

Biography information from Wikiquote

Also Known As

Pen Names: Kathleen Tierney
Alternative Names: Caitlín Rebekah Kiernan Caitlin R. Kiernan Caitlin Rebekah Kiernan
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Additional quotes by Caitlín R. Kiernan

In the end, it's only a story of having had her words and secrets, her confidences, turned against her by someone she once believed entirely beyond any acts of betrayal. A story of pettiness and cruelty and of the lies friends will tell when a friendship has ceased to be profitable or convenient. It is a very simple and inexpressibly complex story of cowardice...

Isn't there some great, grim irony in the fact that the whole country gets a day off work in honor of a man who struggled against and died to end oppression, even after having re-elected one of the greatest would-be oppressors of the last century? And that the threat of freedom for a minority may have been what finally tipped the electoral scales in Dominar Bush's favor? Yes, I think that's what it is, a great, grim irony. King said, "No one is free until we are all free." Somehow, the Reverend Bernice King has missed that part, as have so many other Americans. All or nothing. Personally, I think that Martin Luther King, Jr. Day should have been suspended this year in recognition of Bush's second term. A nation cannot simultaneously pat itself on the back for granting this group of people freedom and strive to deny freedom to this other group. Or, rather, it can, but it should not be permitted to do so. The vacation has not been earned because the work is not finished.

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