Frankisms

“To convey an emotion honestly and convincingly, you must see it honestly yourself. — Ann Hood”

writing

“To create conflict, the kind that’s needed to move a story, you must have two elements—a want and an obstacle. — Jerry Cleaver”

writing

“To learn the act of writing is to obtain magical powers. They are a secret. No one can give them to you. You must work at them yourself. — Natalie Goldberg”

writing

“To make an impact as a writer, you need to do more than make statements that are logical, well supported, and consistent. You must also find a way of entering a conversation with others’ views. — Gerald Graff”

writing

“To make change meaningful it must, to begin with, happen to a character. If you see someone drenched in a downpour, this has somewhat more meaning than a damp street. — Robert McKee”

writing

“To practice “hearing” for your reader, listen to the sounds around you, wherever you are, and think of the words or phrases you could use to describe those sounds. — James Thom”

writing

“To put your readers there and make them feel at home in that time, you must teach them what something is the moment they see it, and make it seem like they’ve known it all along. — James Thom”

writing

“To write a successful novel, we must confront our own feelings. — DiAnn Mills”

writing

“Today’s readers generally tire after an average sentence length of 15 to 17 words. — Joyce Ellis”

writing

“Today’s readers prefer to be part of the adventure by experiencing a single character, one scene at a time. — DiAnn Mills”

writing

“Too many struggling writers never suspect that the creation of a fine screenplay is as difficult as the creation of a symphony. — Robert McKee”

writing

“Tough it up. Write through the tears and conquer the shaky fingers. — DiAnn Mills”

writing

“Translate what you want to say into simple words and concepts that make sense to your readers. — Joe Vitale”

writing

“True character is revealed in the choices a human being makes under pressure—the greater the pressure, the deeper the revelation, the truer the choice to the character’s essential nature. — Robert McKee”

writing

“True tension flows not from the outer actions, but from the inner conflict. — Donald Maass”

writing

“Truly, I’ve seldom seen a piece of prose, or a poem—my own or anyone else’s—that couldn’t be improved upon if it were left alone for a time. — Raymond Carver”

writing

“Truth can be uncomfortable. It can also be comforting. Whatever it is, it is necessary to speak it. — Donald Maass”

writing

“Try to “sit in” a character, record what you experience, and generate sensory and internal information for writing scenes. If this sounds too touchy-feely for you, that’s exactly why you should try it! — Alicia Rasley”

writing

“Try to see each person of interest from as many angles as possible. — James Thom”

writing

“Trying to limit your vocabulary is a way to purify your style: you should aim at the simplest, most common vocabulary that gets the job done. — Robert Pinkert”

writing

“Understand the reasons behind the rules—and therefore know when they should be ignored. — Bill Walsh”

writing

“Unfamiliar settings evoke emotions because we can all relate to the excitement or nervousness related to a new situation. — Cheryl St.John”

writing

“Unless they convey necessary information, sensory details clog a story’s arteries. Like everything else in a story, details and specifics need a story reason to be there. — Lisa Cron”

writing

“Unless you can tweak and improve on one, avoid clichés. Details that are tired and overdone bore your reader and don’t make for fascinating characters. — Cheryl St.John”

writing

“Until you have a fairly solid idea of what’s at stake in your piece and what the themes will be, it’s very difficult to craft the perfect beginning. — Laurie Alberts”

writing

“Up front, tell your reader directly what the character’s goal is and how he thinks he’s going to accomplish it. — Cheryl St.John”

writing

“Use character charts or grids or interview your story people, but do whatever it takes to know them well. — Cheryl St.John”

writing

“Use your imagination to bring appropriate idioms into a character’s speech and to coin phrases that are peculiar to that character. — Elizabeth George”

writing

“Using adverbs frequently is lazy writing because it tells rather than shows. — Cheryl St.John”

writing

“Very often I have awakened in the morning to find a problem or technique, or plot, or character, which had long been troubling me, completely solved while I had been sleeping. — Louis Bromfield”

writing

“Very often it is the writers themselves, with their unusually keen sensitivity and intuition, who build their own emotional traps. — Jane Anne Staw”

writing

“Wars produce many stories of fiction, some of which are told until they are believed to be true. — Ulysses Simpson Grant”

writing

“Watch television and movies with your eyes and ears tuned in to emotional triggers. — Cheryl St.John”

writing

“We are seldom really honest about our own emotions, even to ourselves. — Alicia Rasley”

writing

“We are very arrogant to think we alone have a totally original mind. We are carried on the backs of all the writers who came before us. — Natalie Goldberg”

writing

“We are wired to feel things for people, not for abstractions. — Chip Heath”

writing

“We do not move the emotions of an audience by putting glistening tears in a character’s eyes. — Robert McKee”

writing

“We don’t want the reader to stop and look at the tag. We want them to hear the dialogue. Said is always the best choice. Said is like a ketchup stain on rose-patterned wallpaper: It’s there, but nobody’s paying any attention to it. That’s how we want our dialogue tags to blend in. — Cheryl St.John”

writing

“We forget that other people don’t know what we know. — Chip Heath”

writing

“We have to be willing to write badly before we’ll ever learn to write well. — Cheryl St.John”

writing