James N. Frey Quotes

It has been said that Ernest Hemingway would rewrite scenes
until they pleased him, often thirty or forty times. Hemingway,
critics claimed, was a genius. Was it his genius that drove
him to work hard, or was it hard work that resulted in works
of genius?

Novel writing is like heroin addiction; it takes everything you've got.

You can kill the spell of identification just as easily as you
can create it - if you lose the readers' sympathy for the character.
You can lose reader sympathy by having your character commit
acts of cruelty to another character with whom the readers identify
more strongly or for whom they have strong sympathy. You
can lose reader sympathy by having the character make dumb
choices - acting at less than maximum capacity. The idiot in
the horror story who responds to creepy noises by going into
the attic armed only with a candle is an example. You can lose
reader sympathy when a character seems too ordinary, is stereotyped,
or doesn't struggle hard enough. The reader wants to
cheer a fighter, not witness a milquetoast wallowing in, say, selfpity.

Before you go ahead with a flashback, ask yourself if you can
make the same impact on your reader through conflict in the
now of the novel. If the answer is no, then the flashback is
necessary, but remember that within the flashback all the same
principles of good dramatic storytelling which apply in the now
of your story - fully rounded characters, a rising conflict, inner
conflicts, and so on - continue to apply.

Fiction writers come up with some interesting metaphors when speaking of plot. Some say the plot is the highway and the characters are the automobiles. Others talk about stories that are "plot-driven," as if the plot were neither the highway nor the automobile, but the chauffeur. Others seem to have plot phobia and say they never plot. Still others turn up their noses at the very notion, as if there's something artificial, fraudulent, contrived.

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

You will never work through writer's block if you walk away from your typewriter. That will only make it easier to walk away the next time.

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

The opposing missions of the various characters create the plot.

Fiction can be more real to the reader than reality itself because fiction is the essence of life