writing is such a chaotic sport

Justine Musk (who always has amazingly clever things to say on the topic of wordsmithery) talks about outlining, and why outlines change:

This is what took me way too long (and three published novels) to figure out about plot:

Plot is a process.

…the outline informs the novel but the growing novel also informs the outline.

…What this process requires, however, is a tolerance for ambiguity. For what I described in an earlier blog post as "the muck and murk of writing": the sense that you're...