“Writer's block is real. It happens. Some days you sit down at theold typewriter, put your fingers on the keys, and nothing popsinto your head. Blanko. Nada. El nothingissimo. What you dowhen this happens is what separates you from the one-of-thesedays-I'm-gonna-write-a-book crowd.”

“To set a forest on fire, you light a match. To set a character on fire, you put him in conflict.”

“Before you go ahead with a flashback, ask yourself if you canmake the same impact on your reader through conflict in thenow of the novel. If the answer is no, then the flashback isnecessary, but remember that within the flashback all the sameprinciples of good dramatic storytelling which apply in the nowof your story—fully rounded characters, a rising conflict, innerconflicts, and so on—continue to apply.”

“What's crazy is living your life according to some book written by someone who couldn't imagine what your life would be like.”

“For the most profound experiences in our lives and in the world words are worth nothing. Can you describe love Or death Can you describe what it really feels like the first time you see your child Or the first time your heart gets broken You can try...but it won't come close to describing what it really was or what it really felt like.”

“Readers find most flashbacksintolerable. Yet a lot of neophyte writers flash back like mad.Why? No one but the Creator of the Universe knows for sure,but there is a likely answer: they find the conflicts in the "now"of the story produce anxiety in themselves.”

“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.”