Meliss asked Maggie Shipstead:

Do you know the ending of a book before you write it?

Maggie Shipstead I don't. Or, at least, I didn't with either of my published novels, and I don't with the novel I'm working on now. Welllll . . . actually, that's not entirely true. Seating Arrangements started out as a short story, and the story ended with essentially the same paragraph as the novel. But I didn't know what any of the action leading up to that paragraph would be. I'm not someone who outlines in advance--that kind of planning tends to kill the project for me, and I'm just not very good at it. For me to keep my writing momentum, it seems most important that I commit to a voice and structure and that I have a few plot waypoints out in the future that I'm writing toward. The way I originally drafted it, most chapters of Astonish Me ended where a piece of information was missing, and then the next chapter would usually jump back in time and supply that information. This made for pretty confusing reading and got simplified a bit as I edited, but the plot of the book evolved organically as I went.

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