British English has many phrases for a plan that is meant to be rough.
Back-of-the-envelope: Worked out quickly, with rough figures.
Broad brush: Covering the main points and leaving out the detail.
In broad strokes: In outline only.
Good enough to be going on with: Not final, but enough to start work.
We’ll fill in the details as we go: The details will follow once the work has begun.
In the foreword to The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien wrote: “This tale grew in the telling, until it became a history of the Great War of the Ring.” He had begun it soon after The Hobbit was published, as a sequel.
In a letter to W. H. Auden dated 7 June 1955, he described how one of its central characters appeared: “Strider sitting in the corner at the inn was a shock, and I had no more idea who he was than had Frodo.”
The film director Mike Leigh starts work without a script. In a 2008 interview with Minnesota Public Radio, he described himself as “the guy with no script, who won’t tell you what the film is about and won’t discuss casting.”
He develops the characters together with his actors. “A character doesn’t exist in a vacuum,” he said. “Obviously, a character develops by interaction with other characters.”
Oh, What a Lovely War! opened at the Theatre Royal Stratford East on 19 March 1963. Theatre Workshop, the company that created it, developed its productions through improvisation. For this show, each member of the company was given a topic of the First World War to learn about.
Charles Dickens published The Pickwick Papers in parts. In a later preface, he explained that “no ingenuity of plot was attempted, or even at that time considered very feasible by the author.” He linked this to “the desultory mode of publication adopted.”
The novel opens with the Pickwick Club, but the club did not last. Its “machinery,” Dickens wrote, “proving cumbrous in the management, was gradually abandoned as the work progressed.”
A saying attributed to Oliver Cromwell runs: “No one rises so high as he who knows not whither he is going.” It is widely quoted, including on a website devoted to Cromwell. No source from Cromwell’s own time has been confirmed, so the attribution remains uncertain.
In 1883, the Cambridge historian John Robert Seeley published The Expansion of England. It contains a much-quoted sentence about the British Empire: “We seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind.”
After the Great Fire of London in 1666, Christopher Wren drew up a plan for a new City of London. It was never adopted. The City kept its medieval street pattern, with improvements, and it “was rebuilt through regulatory technique rather than imposition of a master plan.”
In March 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, an English computer scientist at CERN, wrote a proposal called Information Management: A Proposal. His manager, Mike Sendall, wrote his comment on it: “Vague, but exciting.”
Sendall accepted the proposal and approved a NeXT computer for the work. It became the World Wide Web.