"“When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story,” he said. “When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.”" - Stephen King
"Plots and hooks yield the same desideratum: they set the reader a question, with the implicit assurance that the question will be answered." - Martin Amis
Questions like “what are you compulsive about?” can sometimes reveal the other person’s elephant. Or: “Where have you experienced a moment of ignition, when you saw some older person doing an activity and you intuited that they were wired the same way you were, and you said to yourself ‘I want to be that’?” Or: “How would your spouse/sibling/parent... See more
hold your own view as just one in a collection of views. This requires an ability to hold multiple perspectives at once, a state of partial knowing that the poet John Keats called “negative capability”—in one author’s definition, “the innocence from agendas that enables one to become like what one observes rather than impose the self upon it, the... See more