Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
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“I would urge you to ask yourself why: why this? Why now? Why me?”
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A good theme springs up out of your personal obsessions and turns them into complex ideas, or thrilling actions, or both. If the plot is the bones and the characters are the heart and blood vessels, the theme is the guts and the brain.
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it’s not the basic premise, it’s about what I personally can bring to that setup. And the “best” story ideas are the ones where I have to tease out the implications and find my own meaning.
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If picking a story idea is a matter of going on a lot of first dates, then finishing the story is an ongoing relationship in which it’s helpful to keep asking, “what are we doing here?” The same way a romance gets sweeter the more you communicate with your loved one about your hopes and anxieties, I’ve always found that I bond more tightly with my work-in-progress by taking it apart in my head and asking, “What am I getting out of this?” That way, I can home in on the juicy parts of the story.
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we capture the emotion and the visceral experience of living through something by projecting them onto something else
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The characters’ own obsessions This is often the richest vein, for me. The things that float to the surface of the characters’ internal monologues are an important part of the story’s fabric. We care about protagonists who care about stuff—who crave answers to their questions, or who need to resolve an identity crisis. Anything the characters keep arguing about or trying to make sens