Process
Status Items Highlights Done See section below Claims None Questions None Output None
Highlights
Location 179
If you don’t invent and construct well, then all your beautiful prose will be no more effective than a singer vocalizing or a clarinetist warming up — very pretty technique, perhaps, but music it ain’t. And if you don’t write well, readers will be hard put to discover the wonderful story you want to tell — just as bad acting can ruin a good script, or out-of-tune, clumsy, underrehearsed musicians can make Mozart sound like a mess.
Location 251
A character is what he does, yes — but even more, a character is what he means to do.
Location 264
are what they have done, and what has been done to them.
Location 289
his reputation is deserved or not, however, it must be taken into account. Part of a character’s identity is what others say about him.
Location 311
A character who is familiar and unsurprising seems comfortable, believable — but not particularly interesting. A character who is unfamiliar and strange is at once attractive and repulsive, making the reader a little curious and a little afraid.
Location 455
readers know a character’s actions, motives, past, reputation, relationships, habits, talents, and tastes, they can often get through a whole story without ever knowing a character’s eye color, and they’ll still feel as if they know the person.
Location 459
the first three: what the character does in the story, what his motives are, and what he has done in the past.
Location 474
1: So What? Why should I care about what’s going on in this story? Why is this important? Why shouldn’t I go downstairs and watch TV? I’ve seen this kind of thing happen in stories a thousand times before. If this is all the story’s about, I’m through with it. Question 2: Oh Yeah? Come on, I don’t believe anybody would do that. That isn’t the way things work. That was pretty convenient, wasn’t it? How dumb does this author think I am? Give me a break. This author doesn’t know anything. I’m through with this story. Question 3: Huh? What’s happening? This doesn’t make any sense. I don’t know who’s talking or what they’re talking about. Where is this stuff happening? I don’t get it. This is just a bunch of words, it doesn’t amount to anything.
Location 706
But such possibilities only emerge when we demand more from the idea, when we ask more why and what result questions. If you stop with the first acceptable answer, the first “good enough” version of the story, you lose the chance to move from shallowness to depth, from simplicity to complexity, from a merely fun story to a fun but powerful one.
Location 714
A little exaggeration helps turn an ordinary, believable, dull person into an interesting one.
Location 724
We had all assumed that the young king would be restive under his obligatory limitations, yearning for sex and trying to find a way to escape his guardians. But Wolfe said, “No, no, you don’t understand. This young man thinks they don’t restrict him enough.
Location 738
when you think the idea is just right, when the character is exactly what you want her to be, exaggerate an aspect of her that nobody else has ever thought of exaggerating. Or give the character a little twist. Or both.
Location 753
What could go wrong? — is one of the basic questions you ask to get a story or situation out of an idea for a character. Often you’ll find yourself in the opposite position. You’ll have an idea for a setting or situation for a story, and you won’t have any idea about who the characters ought to be. Then the question you ask is: Who suffers most in this situation?
Location 762
it? There are questions the audience asks: So what? Oh yeah? Huh? You ask those questions, too, but you ask many more. There are the causal questions: What made this happen? What is the purpose? What is the result? Then there are the questions that open up story and character possibilities: What can go wrong? Who suffers most in this situation? Finally, there are two processes that wring the last drop from a character or story idea: Exaggeration. The Twist.
✏️ Summary of the chapter for what to do with an idea. 🔗 Location 762
Location 821
An interesting observation is nothing more than local color, a bit of background — until you wring from it all its story and character potential.
Location 838
that believability in fiction doesn’t come from the facts — what actually happened. It comes from the readers’ sense of what is plausible — what is likely to happen.
Location 878
Your readers already “know” people as well as real people ever know each other. They turn to fiction in order to know people better than they can ever know them in real life.
Location 890
There is one person you can always interview, however, who will tell you much more of the truth than others ever will — yourself. You can imagine what it would take to get you to behave in a certain way.
Location 922
think of a time when I carelessly disregarded someone else’s feelings because I was rushing to get a job done. I lost a friendship. I didn’t kill anyone, but I did feel that same single-minded focus on my goal that left no room for regarding another person’s needs. In my mind, that former friend had ceased to be a person. And, remembering that painful event in my past, I can then, by analogy, show how my character completely disregards the value of other people’s lives.
Location 1322
The four factors are milieu, idea, character, and event. The milieu is the world surrounding the characters — the landscape, the interior spaces, the surrounding cultures the characters emerge from and react to; everything from weather to traffic laws. The idea is the information that the reader is meant to discover or learn during the process of the story. Character is the nature of one or more of the people in the story — what they do and why they do it. It usually leads to or arises from a conclusion about human nature in general. The events of the story are everything that happens and why.
Location 1504
That is your first contract with the reader — you will end what you began. Digressions will be tolerated, to a point; but digressions will almost never be accepted as a substitute for fulfilling the original contract. You also make a second contract all the way through a story: Anything you spend much time on will amount to something in the story.
Location 1762
establish your hierarchy of characters. The techniques you can control are: Ordinariness vs. strangeness The amount of time devoted to the character The character’s potential for making meaningful choices Other characters’ focus on him The character’s frequency of appearance The character’s degree of involvement in the action Readers’ sympathy for the character Narration from the character’s point of view
Location 1817
increase the power of suffering, not by describing the injury or loss in greater detail, but rather by showing more of its causes and effect. Blood and gore eventually make the audience gag; sobbing and moaning eventually earn the audience’s laughter or contempt. On the other hand, if you make us understand how intensely the character loved before losing the loved one or trusted before being betrayed, then his grief will have far greater power, even if you show it with great economy. If you show a character coping with her pain or grief, refusing to succumb to it, then readers will wince or weep for her. Another rule of thumb: If your characters cry, your readers won’t have to; if your characters have good reason to cry, and don’t, your readers will do the weeping.
Location 1831
Self-chosen suffering for the sake of a greater good — sacrifice, in other words — is far more intense than pain alone.
Location 2491
when you find yourself blocked — when you can’t bring yourself to start or continue a story — the reason is that you have forgotten or have not yet discovered what is extraordinary about your main character. Go back over your notes, over the part of the story you’ve already told, and ask yourself: What’s so special about this woman that people should hear the story of her life? Or, more to the point, ask yourself: Why does her story matter to me
Location 2580
The comedy writer always walks a delicate line between being too believable, and therefore not funny, and being too unbelievable, and therefore losing the audience’s interest.
Location 2723
the tools of realism are designed to present details about a character appropriately and effectively.
Location 2772
Motive tells why he acts as he does; attitude is the way he reacts to outside events.
Location 2904
A rule of thumb: If you feel a need to have a flashback on the first or second page of your story, either your story should begin with the events of the flashback or you should get us involved with some compelling present characters and events before flashing back.
Location 2910
flashbacks should be rare, they should be brief, and they should take place only after you have anchored the story in the present action.
Location 2945
A rule of thumb: The shorter the memory, the less important it needs to be in order to justify stopping the story for it.
Location 3081
As a general rule, the more bizarre and unbelievable the character’s behavior and the more important it is to the story, the earlier in the story you have to begin justifying it and the more time you’ll need to spend to make it believable.
Location 3536
In a good representational story, the audience will forgive a certain clumsiness of writing because they care so much about the characters and events. In a good presentational story, the audience will forgive a certain shallowness of story because they so enjoy the writer’s style and attitude.
Location 3775
So first person is distant in time, third person in space.
Location 3866
The flaw is that the first-person narrator is watching himself as if from a distance, not seeing inside his own head at all. He sees what he does, but never why. We watch him as if through a camera — but since he is the narrator, he wouldn’t watch himself do these things, he would remember them from the inside.
Location 3917
First-person narration must reveal the narrator’s character or it isn’t worth doing. The narrator must be the kind of person who would tell the tale, and her motives and attitudes must show up in the story.
Location 3976
“Later I found out that Nora had slept through most of Tess. It was one more thing we had in common.” But such a reminder that all these events happened long ago would usually be a gross mistake in a first-person account because it would distance the reader from the immediacy of the story.)
Location 4034
The omniscient narrator can tell more story and reveal more character in less time than it takes the limited third-person narrator. That’s the greatest advantage of the omniscient narrator.
Location 4046
The omniscient narrator is always there, tugging at our hands, pulling us from place to place. We see everything and everybody as the narrator sees them, not as the characters see them. We are always outside looking in.
Location 4120
- First-person and omniscient narrations are by nature more presentational than limited third-person — readers will notice the narrator more. If your goal is to get your readers emotionally involved with your main characters, with minimal distraction from their belief in the story, then the limited third-person narrator is your best choice. 2. If you’re writing humor, however, first-person or omniscient narration can help you create comic distance. These intrusive narrators can make wry comments or write with the kind of wit that calls attention to itself, without jarring or surprising a reader who is deeply involved with the characters. 3. If you want brevity, covering great spans of time and space or many characters without writing hundreds or thousands of pages to do it, the omniscient narrator may be your best choice. 4. If you want the sense of truth that comes from an eyewitness account, first person usually feels less fictional, more factual. 5. If you’re uncertain of your ability as a writer, while you’re quite confident of the strength of the story, the limited third-person narration invites a clean, unobtrusive writing style — a plain tale plainly told. You can still write beautifully using the limited third person, but your writing is more likely to be ignored — thus covering a multitude of sins. However, if you know you can write dazzling prose but the story itself is often your weakness, the omniscient and the first person invite you to play with language even if it distracts a bit from the tale itself.