Top Highlights

• Such openings do not attempt to seize our attention but slowly, courteously almost (cortesia, tact of heart, a welcome), invite us inside their world. It’s interesting, you’ll find much to involve you here; please make the effort.
• Images do not have exact time schedules. Names, locations, time schedules, plot references—these are what the images create. In the original image are the seeds of all your novel. See your image, feel it, work it out in all its complexity to the best of your ability, and then try to put it all on the page.
• In the first paragraph you solve most of the problems with your book. The theme is defined, the style, the tone. At least in my case, the first paragraph is a kind of sample of what the rest of the book is going to be.
• How does a character in a novel improve on someone in real life?   A real person, profoundly as we may sympathize with him, is in a great measure perceptible only through our senses, that is to say, he remains opaque, offers a dead weight that our sensibilities have not the strength to lift. If some misfortune comes to him, it is only in one small ...
• The novel, properly handled, can reveal the most secret places of life: for it is in the passional secret places of life, above all, that the tide of sensitive awareness needs to ebb and flow.” Perhaps that is just a more flowery version of what Henry James believed: that the best way to get to know characters is to upset them.