Everything I Know About Outlining I Learned from Elizabeth George

An encounter with a mystery novelist changed the way I work. Maybe.

Mystery writer Elizabeth George came to speak at my MFA one year. She was super nice and then she said something in her lecture like, “Writing is a joy. I don’t know why everyone says it’s so hard.”

After we had patiently waited out the moment where we wanted to put her in stocks, she clarified: George, writer of the Detective Lynley series, is an inveterate outliner.