“A reader doesn't really see the characters in a story; he feels them.”

“My readers have to work with me to create the experience. They have to bring their imaginations to the story. No one sees a book in the same way, no one sees the characters the same way. As a reader you imagine them in your own mind. So, together, as author and reader, we have both created the story.”

“You can kill the spell of identification just as easily as youcan create it—if you lose the readers' sympathy for the character.You can lose reader sympathy by having your character commitacts of cruelty to another character with whom the readers identifymore strongly or for whom they have strong sympathy. Youcan lose reader sympathy by having the character make dumbchoices—acting at less than maximum capacity. The idiot inthe horror story who responds to creepy noises by going intothe attic armed only with a candle is an example. You can losereader sympathy when a character seems too ordinary, is stereotyped,or doesn't struggle hard enough. The reader wants tocheer a fighter, not witness a milquetoast wallowing in, say, selfpity.”

“Now lend me your ears. Here is Creative Writing 101: 1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted. 2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for. 3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water. 4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action. 5. Start as close to the end as possible. 6. Be a sadist. No matter sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of. 7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia. 8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages. The greatest American short story writer of my generation was Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964). She broke practically every one of my rules but the first. Great writers tend to do that.”

“It's this way, see--when a writer first starts out, he gets a big kick from the stuff he does, and the reader doesn't get any;then, after a while, the writer gets a little kick and the reader gets a little kick; and finally, if the writer's any good, he doesn't get any kick at all and the reader gets everything.”

“To write an excellent novel, make the outcome of the story matter to the reader through the evolving relationships between well-designed characters.”