Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.
~ William Zinsser
As Kandinsky says, “Everything starts with a dot.” Sometimes the hardest thing in writing a story is where to start. You don’t need to have a great idea, you just have to put pen to paper. Start with a bad idea, start with the wrong direction, start with a character you don’t like, something positive will come out of it. – Marion Deuchars
Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but that’s the only way you can do anything really good. ~ William Faulkner
What Does Dialogue Reveal?
- Spoken dialogue shows the person your character wants others to see.
- Inner dialogue shows the true person, how the character really feels.
Use this knowledge to your advantage. You can have a hero who sweet talks a heroine, but his inner dialogue reveals his nose should be stretched to the length of a ruler. Inner dialogue gives the reader an edge—an inside look at a character’s true self causes the reader to know she is getting a heads-up from a reliable source. By combining both, and focusing on creating actions and reactions, you can make a scene spark.
“So your own winning style must begin with ideas in your head.” Kurt Vonnegut
“Avoid cliques, gangs, groups. The presence of a crowd won’t make your writing any better than it is.” ~ Zadie Smith
Unless you’re Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language or write landscapes in the style of Jim Harrison. But even if you’re good at it, you don’t want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill. ~ Elmore Leonard
“Write the way you talk. Naturally.” ~ David Ogilvy
Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer’s own life. ~ Eurdora Welty
There are stories that you can write, and there are stories that you can’t write. And, in the end, you write the ones that you can, and that allows you to bear the ones that you can’t. ~ Jeanette Winterson
