please help me get out of the way so I can write what wants to be written.

jealousy is a secondary emotion, that it is born out of feeling excluded and deprived, and that if I worked on those age-old feelings, I would probably break through the jealousy.

A moral position is not a slogan, or wishful thinking. It doesn’t come from outside or above. It begins inside the heart of a character and grows from there. Tell the truth and write about freedom and fight for it, however you can, and you will be richly rewarded.

write about the things that are most important to you. Love and death and sex and survival are important to most of us. Some of us are also interested in God and ecology.

a moral position is not a message. A moral position is a passionate caring inside you.

The core, ethical concepts in which you most passionately believe are the language in which you are writing.

good dialogue gives us the sense that we are eavesdropping, that the author is not getting in the way. Thus, good dialogue encompasses both what is said and what is not said.

If someone isn’t changed, then what is the point of your story?

She said that sometimes she uses a formula when writing a short story, which goes ABDCE, for Action, Background, Development, Climax, and Ending. You begin with action that is compelling enough to draw us in, make us want to know more. Background is where you let us see and know who these people are, how they’ve come to be together, what was going