I'm fairly confident with making/destroying linked lists (one of my few strengths compared to other inexperienced coders), but I see what you mean.

For the first node you'd certainly use a method of creating the head node pointer then linking it to the first node, but after that, you can use a temporary pointer to point to the new nodes and link if you're wanting to perform an insertion rather than an append. For supporting inserts, that's actually a bit clearer. Otherwise, you would create pointers to nodes before and after the insert point to keep track of the rest of the list while you added nodes, which is trivially more expensive in terms of memory.