“Don't think about it as writing. People don't read books to acquire writing. They do it for experiences. Think of writing as an experience. Build that experience, develop it, and then adapt and translate that experience to writing.”

“The great contemporary novelists are masters of point of view. The only reason people still read books is there's a point of view—something movies can't do. We can be inside somebody's mind, and have their subjective experience. It's not done directly. It's done through this filtration, through narration. And it's endless in its variety, and can do so many different things.”

“You don’t have to understand things to do them. You understand things by doing them. Begin by beginning. Get your hands in the mix and the mess. You can't understand your story fully before you write it.”

“The reason to create a story is to do it, regardless of the success of the project. It’s always a thrill—a wonderful challenge and learning experience.”

“To test-drive your story, tell it to a friend or group of people, and see how they react. If a movie unspools in their heads, you know if the story rings true.”

“Start with a zero draft. This is not a first draft, but somewhere between stream of consciousness and prose. Talk into a recorder while you’re walking. Talking while you’re in motion keeps you honest. You don't get fancy or writerly and distort your own voice.”

“Rather than setting out to write content, write a scene as a process to get to know your character, and just see what will happen. Let their point of view drive things. Having this close interaction with them is a terrific way of finding out whether your character is real to you.”

“We understand from watching well-made movies and reading well-wrought novels that you don't do characterization and then start plot, or work on plot and then develop character. Character and story emerge together from what people do.”

“Structure is static. Incidentation—the set of incidents in a story—helps get your story to the point where it’s dynamic and develops its own energy.”

“Every good story develops a will. It has a life to it, an internal drive. At a certain point, your job is to get out of the way.”

“When my instinct says that's wrong, I can trust it. But when my instinct says that's right, it's trust but verify.”

“As an editor, I’m looking to hear a voice. If you have a voice, there's everything in the world to work with. If you don’t have a voice, you may acquire one, but I don’t know how to help you do that. Writing can be learned, but it cannot be taught.”

“I don't have the capacity to buy into my own inventions the way I will other people's. The flow—that feeling that the wave has caught the board and I'm up on my feet is not solely the characters, but it's entirely about the characters. It's my forgetting that I'm not them. That is what great stories do for us.”

“A great story makes us feel that the lives of the characters go on. That they've got some kind of destiny ahead of them. I don't believe or disbelieve in karma in life, but I certainly believe in it for characters.”

“Writing isn’t fun every minute. But if it's not fun at all, that's going to show through. A book that is not fun to write, is not fun to read.”