plot

Whether you’re in the stage of elevating a finished draft or staring at a blinking cursor on a blank page, consider how tapping into your own emotional truths can flesh out your characters and plot. Ask yourself:

• When in your life have you felt an acute urgency to act? How can you tap into that memory (sensory details, actions, pacing) to empower a scene?
• When was a moment in your life where you felt extreme [insert the needed emotion here]? How did your view of the world shift as you felt this way? What subtleties of that emotion could be brought to the page in atmosphere, mood, or tone.
• When have you been up against a roadblock, when you’ve been unsure how you would ever get past it? How did you react? What did you do? What was brewing inside you? How can this moment enhance your protagonist’s drive?

~ Kris Spisak

Source

“When you have an important story to tell, the words you need seem to come of their own accord.”

~ A. Jance

Source

“I always try to make the setting fit the story I have in mind.” ~ Tony Hillerman

Source

“In the most basic way, writers are defined not by the stories they tell, or their politics, or their gender, or their race, but by the words they use. Writing begins with language, and it is in that initial choosing, as one sifts through the wayward lushness of our wonderful mongrel English, that choice of vocabulary and grammar and tone, the selection on the palette, that determines who’s sitting at that desk. Language creates the writer’s attitude toward the particular story he’s decided to tell.”

~ Donald E. Westlake

“For me, writing is an experience. It’s an exercise in which I want to discover myself by taking my characters to the edges of human experience, to the edges of themselves and then, asking certain questions – about love, what does it mean to love? What’s beauty? What is true beauty?”

~ Ted Dekker

Source

“I do not outline. There are writers I know and count as my friends who certainly do it the other way but for me part of the adventure is not knowing how it’s going to turn out.”

~ Joyce Maynard

Source

“Whenever I start a novel, I’m always looking for two things: a bit of science that makes me go ‘what if?’ and a piece of history that ends in a question mark.” ~ James Rollins

What are you looking for when you begin?

Source

“I try to write about things, places, events, and phenomena I know about personally. That helps make the novels more genuine.” ~ Lincoln Child

Source

“One thing that helps is to give myself permission to write badly. I tell myself that I’m going to do my five or 10 pages no matter what, and that I can always tear them up the following morning if I want. I’ll have lost nothing-writing and tearing up five pages would leave me no further behind than if I took the day off.”

~ Lawrence Block

Source

“A good short story asks a question that can’t be answered in simple terms. And even if we come up with some understanding, years later, while glancing out of a window, the story still has the potential to return, to alter right there in our mind and change everything.” ~ Walter Mosley

Source