Lisa Cron Quotes

Elmore Leonard famously said that a story is real life with the boring parts left out.

If I ask you to think about something, you can decide not to. But if I make you feel something? Now I have your attention.

You cherry-pick events that are relevant to the story question and construct a gauntlet of challenge (read: the plot) that will force the protagonist to put his money where his mouth is. Think baptism by ever-escalating fire.

And while in the olden days, disgruntled readers suffered pretty much in silence, now there's Amazon. The last thing you want are myriad scathing reviews that potential readers find helpful.

Before there were books, we read each other.

You slogged from the terrifying emptiness of the blank page to the two most beautiful words in a writer's vocabulary: The End.

What draws us into a story and keeps us there is the firing of our dopamine neurons, signaling that intriguing information is on the way.

Each scene in your story, ask yourself, If I cut it out, would anything that happens afterward change?

Stories are about people who are uncomfortable.

Stories not only give us a much needed practice on figuring out what makes people tick, they give us insight into how we tick.

In short, when we read a story, we really do slip into the protagonist's skin, feeling what she feels, experiencing what she experiences. And what we feel is based, 100 percent, on one thing: her goal, which then defines how she evaluates everything the other characters do. If we don't know what she wants, we have no idea how, or why, what she does helps her achieve it. As Pinker is quick to point out, without a goal, everything is meaningless.6 It

Narrators are often unreliable, and part of the reader's pleasure is figuring out what's really true. The

MYTH: Beautiful Writing Trumps All
REALITY: Storytelling Trumps Beautiful Writing, Every Time