Quote of the Week: Marjorie Franco

“In our attempt to make the reader care, I believe we must keep in mind the difference between identifying with and relating to characters. The definition of identify is “to be, or become the same.” Writers who create unique characters shouldn’t expect the reader to identify with them. I take the view that though there [...]

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Quote of the Week: Mary E. DeMuth

“We’ve all heard the mantra: Show, don’t tell. Perhaps the secret to showing is actually living our own stories well. About living beyond the confines of our own interior world to explore the world we long to write about. It’s in that diving into real life that we no longer settle for telling about a [...]

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Quote of the Week: Billy Mernit

“Used properly, first drafts are great metal detector-like instruments. They show you which areas require digging, whether what’s under the surface turns out to be silver or scrap metal.” – Billy Mernit Billy Mernit teaching “Writing the Romantic Comedy” at UCLA’s writer’s program. He’s serves as a script consultant and story analyst for Universal Studios [...]

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Quote of the Week: Sophocles

“One must learn by doing the thing; for though you think you know it you have no certainty, until you try.” – Sophocles Sophocles is one of three ancient Greek tragedians whose plays have survived. Sophocles wrote 123 plays during the course of his life, but only seven have survived in a complete form: Ajax, [...]

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Quote of the Week: Annie Dillard

“On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away.” ~ Annie Dillard Annie Dillard is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American author. She is best known for her narrative prose in both fiction and non-fiction. She has published two novels, poetry, essays, prose, [...]

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Quote of the Week: Point-of-View

Since I’m exploring point-of-view right now it seemed like it would be a great idea to stick to theme with this week’s quotes: “The third person narrator, instead of being omniscient, is like a constantly running surveillance tape.” – Andrew Vachss “The choice of point-of-view will largely determine all other choices with regards to style, [...]

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Quote of the Week: David Mack

“Do you think books help shape your identity? Or do they only reveal it?” – David Mack “Talent is a misused notion. You’ve got to do the work for the talent to show up.” – David Mack “My work [art] is a connect-the-dots… it’s just a bunch of dots and it’s not complete until someone [...]

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Quote of The Week: John Gardner (on Endings)

“A novel is like a symphony in that its closing movement echoes and resounds with all that has gone before. Toward the close of a novel, the writer brings back — directly or in the form of his characters recollections — images, characters, events, and intellectual motifs encountered earlier. Unexpected connections begin to surface; hidden [...]

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Quote of the Week: John Gardner

John Gardner and his book “The Art of Fiction” came up again and again and again at my first VCFA residency (so go read it if you haven’t yet!). I’m only about half way through the book, but I thought I might share a few quotes that stood out to me in my reading: “There [...]

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Quote of the Week: Vincent Van Gogh

“I believe that it may happen that one will succeed, and one must not begin to despair, even though one sometimes feels a kind of decay, though things go differently from the expected, it is necessary to take heart again and have new courage. For the great things are not done by impulse, but by [...]

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