Never Tell Your Reader What Your Story Is About
/Never tell your reader what your story is about. Reading is a participatory sport. People do it because they are intelligent and enjoy figuring things out for themselves.
GEORGE V. HIGGINS
Never tell your reader what your story is about. Reading is a participatory sport. People do it because they are intelligent and enjoy figuring things out for themselves.
GEORGE V. HIGGINS
Choice of subject is of cardinal importance. One does by far one’s best work when besotted by and absorbed in the matter at hand.
JESSICA MITFORD
A good style comes primarily from lack of pretentiousness, and what is pretentious changes from year to year from day to day from minute to minute. We must be ever more careful. A man does not get old because he nears death; a man gets old because he can no longer see the false from the good.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
Try to make them tell you what they really want. Most often they recognize what they don’t want, but have a much harder time explaining what it is you’re supposed to give them. Make them tell!
MAUREEN ORTH
Life goes on, and for the sake of verisimilitude and realism, you cannot possibly give the impression of an ending: you must let something hang. A cheap interpretation of that would be to say that you must always leave a chance for a sequel. People die, love dies, but life does not die, and so long as people live, stories must have life at the end.
JOHN O’HARA
By the end, you should be inside your character, actually operating from within somebody else, and knowing him pretty well, as that person knows himself or herself. You’re sort of a predator, an invader of people.
WILLIAM TREVOR
Don’t include camera angles or other technical directions [in your screenplay]. Those are the director’s or editor’s or D.P.’s jobs. No CLOSE SHOT, PAN, ZOOM IN, or any of the dozens of others you happen to know…unless there is a rare occasion when it is absolutely necessary for a story point. In fact, the direction CUT TO is a waste of space on the page and generally a redundancy: How do you usually get from one scene to another if not by cutting to it? (Yeah, I know: dissolve, wipe, flip, fade, etc. Don’t write any of them.) No references to other movies. And no music; especially no lyrics. That’s why they invented composers and music supervisors.
TONY BILL
It would be crazy to begin revising immediately after finishing the first draft, and counter to the way the mind likes to create. You’re exhausted. You deserve a vacation. Go away from the project for at least a week.
KENNETH ATCHITY
You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
FRANZ KAFKA
Bad readers have asked me if I was drugged when I wrote some of my works. But that illustrates that they don’t know anything about literature or drugs. To be a good writer you have to be absolutely lucid at every moment of writing, and in good health.
GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
Writerly wisdom of the ages collected by the author of Advice To Writers, The Big Book of Irony, and The Portable Curmudgeon.
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