when you let your characters make their own choices, they become real people who can tell you where they need to go. By making your character’s decisions and needs part of your plot right from the beginning, treating them as active participants in the novel rather than passengers on a rollercoaster to the climax, you end up with easier plotting, fa

when I talked about how I fill the parts of my plot that I don’t know yet by asking “What comes next?” or “How did this happen?” Well, most of the time the answers to those questions come from my characters, and in a circular turn, these answers serve to develop the characters who give them. This is how plot and character development go hand in han

This ability to make decisions that change the direction of the plot is called character agency, and it is vital.

So don’t blame your subconscious when it doesn’t want to write. Listen to it. Treat your instincts with respect, especially if they’re telling you to stop. Let your daily writing be a joy instead of a chore, and everything else becomes easy.

If your goal is to become a faster writer, the single most efficient change you can make isn’t actually upping your daily word count, but eliminating the days where you are not writing.

A book is not a battle, nor is it a conquest. A book is a story, and telling it should be an enjoyable exercise. So the next time you don’t want to write, don’t waste time beating yourself up. Instead, stop and ask yourself why. Why do you not want to do this fundamentally enjoyable thing? What’s really going on?

if I could make one absolute assertion, it would be this: If you are not enjoying your writing, you’re doing it wrong.

Every day, while I was writing out my description of what I was going to write for the knowledge component of the triangle, I would play the scene through in my mind and try to get excited about it. I'd look for all the cool little hooks, the parts that interested me most, and focus on those since they were obviously what made the scene cool. If I

I started keeping records. Every day I sat down to write, I would note the time I started, the time I stopped, how many words I wrote, and where I was writing on a spreadsheet