“I am a very messy worker – I push these scenes around our table. It is a big table, and over time I realise which scenes are connected. I have never written anything from beginning to end, not a story or a novel. I just collect different scenes, and the ones that aren’t any good to me, get slipped on to the floor and eventually into the wastebasket.”
Elizabeth Strout, "My writing day: Elizabeth Strout: ‘I have never written anything from beginning to end’"
The Guardian, March 4, 2017