Art & Creativity Quote by Robert B. Parker

Parker is puncturing the myth of the novelist as a master planner, a god with an outline. The line lands because it sounds almost sheepish, then reveals a professional creed: writing isn’t the transcription of a preexisting idea; it’s the machinery that produces the idea. For a crime and suspense writer especially, that’s a quietly radical admission. Readers imagine tight plotting as engineering. Parker implies it’s closer to a chase: you run, you discover what you’re chasing.

The intent is partly demystification, partly self-protection. By confessing uncertainty, he lowers the prestige of “knowing” and elevates the act of doing. It’s also a subtle rebuke to the workshop-industrial approach to creativity, where concept precedes execution and the book is treated like a product spec. Parker’s subtext: if you wait to be certain, you don’t write; if you write, certainty is a byproduct.

Context matters. Parker built a long-running series career with a lean, propulsive style - books that feel inevitable when you’re inside them. This remark reveals how inevitability gets manufactured: not through clairvoyance, but through forward motion, scene by scene, voice by voice, letting character decisions force plot decisions. The exclamation point isn’t just enthusiasm; it’s a wink at the anxiety beneath the process. He’s telling aspiring writers that the blank page is not a referendum on talent. It’s the lab where the book’s subject finally shows up.