Art & Creativity Quote by Jackie Collins

Collins turns the supposedly sober machinery of publishing into a punchline: the synopsis, that sacred little document meant to tame a book into a sellable promise, is basically fan fiction she writes about her own unwritten novel. The wit isn’t dainty; it’s defiant. She’s telling you that the story’s real authority doesn’t live in an outline, a pitch deck, or a marketing meeting. It lives in the messy act of drafting, where characters misbehave and plot reveals itself late, like gossip at the end of a long night.

The subtext is a quiet flex. Collins built an empire on page-turning excess and high-gloss scandal, but she’s also claiming a working method closer to literary “discovery writing” than the industrial expectation that authors behave like project managers. When she says she “invent[s] something for my publisher,” it’s not just a practical workaround; it’s an exposure of the performance demanded of writers, especially commercially successful women: be prolific, be predictable, be legible in advance. She refuses the pre-approved version of herself.

Context matters, too. Collins worked in a marketplace that treated “popular” fiction as both cash cow and cultural second-class citizen. This line reframes that tension as leverage: the publisher gets a synopsis to calm the system, while the actual book stays unruly, responsive, and alive. The charm is how casually she admits the con, as if everyone should already know the game.