Against what so many people believe, there are writers who just knock out their book as they go. Outlining? Whiteboarding? Nah.

E. L. Doctorow was one of those. He told The Paris Review that Ragtime didn’t start because of deep research or a carefully plotted idea. It was really just an accident:

I was so desperate to write something, I was facing the wall of my study in my house in New Rochelle and so I started to write about the wall. That’s the kind of day we sometimes have, as writers. Then I wrote about the house that was attached to the wall. It was built in 1906, you see, so I thought about the era and what Broadview Avenue looked like then: trolley cars ran along the avenue down at the bottom of the hill; people wore white clothes in the summer to stay cool. Teddy Roosevelt was President. One thing led to another and that’s the way that book began: through desperation to those few images…

One thing leads to another, as Doctorow also enunciated with a much-clipped statement which has given heart to many a disorganized and desperate writer over the years:

Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way…