From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction

If the evidence shows that this work absolutely comes from the unconscious and the character has manifest, felt yearning, only then can you begin to think in technical terms.

As writers we must have compassion for all the characters we create. If we’re going to play God, we have to be a loving God, and you can’t love with your brain.

in the tenth week, you go down that one, as far as you want to go—because at each point you are rewriting and redreaming the book on the level of structure.

All the time, in everything you write in your fiction, this must be the standard mode of discourse unless and until the organic object not only allows but demands, from deep, resonant, dream-driven places, that the mode of discourse in a particular passage vary into other modes.

You look around the room, everything in it shaped by an unspecified anxiety. Let’s see the room, in the moment, through the senses.

The experience is, in fact, a kind of cinema of the inner consciousness.

I want to deal with some of those techniques tonight, because I think they can help you overcome some of the problems I’ve been describing in the past few weeks: the impulse for abstraction and analysis, for summary and generalization, problems of rhythm and transition—how to get from one scene to another or one image to another or one sentence to

Now this is the great thing about fiction. We can move from fast action to slow motion to real time seamlessly and with great nuance.

as I stumbled over the answer, revising it for her approval as I went along.

What are you doing? You’re looking for the first good scene in the book—the best point of attack.