Sol Stein Famous Quotes
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It can be said that one slip of point of view by a writer can hurt a story badly, and several slips can be fatal.' Stein on Writing
The expert magician seeks to deceive the mind, rather than the eye.
Parents begin by loving their children; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.
A writer who always has his characters "walk" is missing opportunities.
Dialogue is a lean language in which every word counts.
The biggest difference between a writer and a would-be writer is their attitude toward rewriting ... Unwillingness to revise usually signals an amateur.
Our instinct as human beings is to provide answers, to ease tension. As writers our job is the opposite, to create tension and not dispel it immediately.
A writer writes what other people only think.
Be sure you don't stop the story while describing. You are a storyteller, not an interior decorator.
A lawyer's job is to manipulate the skeletons in other people's closets.
Readers take in dialogue one thought at a time. A frequent mistake of beginners is to combine thoughts, which may be suitable for other forms of writing but not for dialogue. Another mistake is speechifying. Three sentences at a time is tops, yet many beginners write speeches that go on and on.
Dialogue, contrary to popular view, is not a recording of actual speech; it is a semblance of speech, an invented language of exchanges that build in tempo or content toward climaxes.
He glared at me and said, "Look how you're dressed." I looked down and could see only what I had seen in the mirror that morning, the suit and shirt and tie that was customary for students at the time. "Your suit is blue," he said. "Your shirt is blue, your tie is blue. That's what's wrong with your writing." When my ordeal was over I slunk away from Goodman's cubicle to rethink the sameness of my writing and to learn the value of variety. It took some time for me to learn the other lesson, that a writer, shy or not, needs a tough skin, for no matter how advanced one's experience and career, expert criticism cuts to the quick, and one learns to endure and to perfect, if for no other reason than to challenge the pain-maker.
Today's readers can be roughly divided into two groups, those who accept the fantasy villains of childhood, as in the James Bond stories and Arnold Schwarzenegger films, and those who insist on credibility.
To create tension, dialogue needs to be stretched out. That is, characters should not be immediately responsive.
You can never know enough about your characters.
The function of suspense is to put the reader in danger of an overfull bladder.
Arousal is nature's stimulus for the propagation of the human race. The unaroused male of the species is as useless for that purpose as a worm. Arousal can happen sooner or later, but it must happen.
In America only the successful writer is important, in France all writers are important, in England no writer is important, in Australia you have to explain what a writer is.
The single characteristic that most makes a difference in the success of an article or nonfiction book is the author's courage in revealing normally unspoken things about himself or his society. It takes guts to be a writer
Say it new or say it straight.
Most of the time, tough, combative, adversarial dialogue is much more exciting than physical action.
There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.
