43 quotes found
“It would ha' been a good deal easier, if ye'd only been a witch.”
“To some extent, emotions are universal and can be treated that way; no matter what the participants orientation or preference, they have sex for the same reasons and can experience the same array o...”
“Men have external genitalia, while women have internal genitalia. This simple difference makes a lot of difference in how they write about themselvesand how you might write about your characters. M...”
“Theres a little trick called the Rule of Three: if you use any three of the five senses, it will make the scene immediately three-dimensional.”
“Good sex scene is about the exchange of emotions, not bodily fluids”
“If you cant look a line of dialogue in the face and say exactly why its theretake it out or change it.”
“Dont go overboard in avoiding said. Basically, said is the default for dialogue, and a good thing, too; its an invisible word that doesnt draw attention to itself.”
“You want to anchor the scene with physical details, but by and large its better to use sensual details rather than overtly sexual ones.”
“You dont need to know the purpose as you write, but when you read over something youve written, you should be able to point to any given elementbe that a line of dialogue, a descriptive phrase, a p...”
“As a rule of thumb, four consecutive lines of dialogue is about as much as you want to have without a tag.”
“Dont let characters talk pointlesslythey only talk if theres something to say.”
“Dialogue doesnt take place in a vacuum. Dialogue is contradictory, in that it can either speed up or slow down a passage.”
“Pointing out the emotion in a scene is like laughing at your own jokes.”
“If theres true emotional content in a situation between characters, all you do is reveal it.”
“Watch a good movie sometime without reference to whats happening but only with attention to how it was photographed; youll see the change of focuszoom in, pan out, close-up on face, fade to black, ...”
“Just as an effective advertisement or page layout includes a lot of white space, a powerful scene requires immense restraint. Show things as simply as possible.”
“Jamies viewpoint is expressed almost entirely in metaphor: If she was broken, she would slash him with her jagged edges, reckless as a drunkard with a shattered bottle. Hes using physical language,...”
“For a different woman, a different relationship, a different situation, gentleness might have been the proper, the only approachbut not for this woman, in these circumstances. The only thing that w...”
“One of the general patterns of good (i.e., striking and memorable) writing is the effect of repetition. If you use a certain elementa plot device, an image, a noticeable phraseonce, readers may or ...”
“Almost everybody understands that you have to have something at stake for a story to be good.”
