Lee Child writes every Jack Reacher novel without a plan. He opens with a single good sentence, then follows it and lets the story reveal itself on the page, at roughly the speed his readers eventually will. He's worked this way for the whole series.
No Plan, Just a First Sentence
Child doesn't build outlines, character sheets, or chapter plans. He sits down at a blank screen and tries to write one strong opening line, and the book grows outward from it. When he started Make Me, he had a title he liked the sound of and almost nothing else, just a flash of an image: a few men burying a body somewhere. He didn't know who they were, who was in the ground, or why. The first sentence he typed was 'Moving a guy as big as Keever wasn't easy,' and from that one line he wrote his way into the rest of the novel. This is what people mean by discovery writing, and Child is one of its most successful living examples. Across a series of more than two dozen books he's never once mapped the plot in advance, and the method hasn't failed him yet.
The refusal to plan is deliberate. Child has explained that if he plotted the story ahead of time he'd already know how it ends, and knowing would leave him bored for the six months it takes to write. So he keeps himself in the dark on purpose and meets each turn as it arrives, which is close to how a reader experiences the book. That's also where the forward pull of the Reacher novels comes from. He writes each sentence to trip into the next one, so the momentum on the page is real rather than something engineered in later edits. The suspense he feels while drafting is the same suspense he's trying to hand the reader.
The Only Draft
Because he can't revise his way out of trouble later, Child writes the first pass slowly and carefully. He'll sometimes sit with a single sentence for a long stretch before he commits it, then move on and rarely look back. The critic Andy Martin sat directly behind him for the entire composition of Make Me and wrote the experience up afterward. Martin reported that Child refused to treat the manuscript as a rough first pass. He called it the only draft and had no intention of going back to change it, which put enormous weight on getting each line right the first time. Writing slowly, then, is a feature of the system. He's not racing to a fixable draft. He's building the finished book one careful sentence at a time.
When I start a book, I have no idea what the plot is going to be. I try to come up with a good opening sentence.
Lee Child, interview with Fast Company
He works in the afternoons and evenings, fueled by black coffee and cigarettes, and generally finishes a book in roughly six months before setting the writing aside until the next year. For the full picture of his hours, his habits, and the once-a-year rhythm behind all of it, see the full Lee Child writing routine.
What You Can Steal
- Start with one good sentence. Child builds an entire novel outward from a single opening line. You only need the first one to move.
- Keep yourself in suspense. He refuses to outline so he won't get bored. If the story can surprise you, it can surprise the reader.
- Write forward. He drafts slowly and resists going back, so the momentum stays pointed ahead instead of stalling in edits.
- Trust what you've absorbed. Decades of reading gave him the instincts he improvises with. Read enough and your gut gets reliable.