Nancy Kress
Nancy Kress
Nancy Anne Kressis an American science fiction writer. She began writing in 1976 but has achieved her greatest notice since the publication of her Hugo and Nebula-winning 1991 novella Beggars in Spain which she later expanded into a novel with the same title. She has also won the Nebula Award for Best Novella in 2013 for "After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall", and in 2015 for "Yesterday's Kin"...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth20 January 1948
CountryUnited States of America
Words that add no new information or aren't repeated for emphasis are just padding. A sentence may carry three or five or eight of them, each one as unnoticeable as an extra two ounces on your hips but collectively adding up to a large burden of fat.
When a story is flying along, and I'm so into it that my 'real' world goes away, it can feel magical. I cease to be, my desk and computer ceases to be, and I am my character in his world. Psychologists call this a 'flow state,' and it's better than publication, money, awards, fame.
Every paragraph should accomplish two goals: advance the story, and develop your characters as complex human beings.
Fiction is about stuff that's screwed up.
Technology is Darwinian. It spreads. It evolves. It adapts. The most dangerous wipes out the less fit.
Religious reverence for one's own job, even if the job is worth doing, is a sexual turnoff.
You must learn to be three people at once: writer, character, and reader.
There are two wrong reactions to a rejection slip: deciding it's a final judgment on your story and/or talent, and deciding it's no judgment on your story and/or talent.
Anything said in upper-crust British automatically sounded intelligent.
In commercial fiction especially, everything in the story usually contributes directly to the plot The shorter the story, the truer this is
Characterization is not divorced from plot, not a coat of paint you slap on after the structure of events is already built. Rather characterization is inseparable from plot.
Changers are characters who alter in significant ways as a result of the events of your story. They learn something or grow into better or worse people, but by the end of the story they are not the same personalities they were in the beginning. Their change, in its various stages, is called the story's emotional arc.
What characters do must grow out of who they are, and who they are is, in turn, influenced by what you make happen to them.
Some writers find that they don't know their themes until they've finished the first draft (I am one). They then rewrite with an eye toward balancing on that tightrope: not too contrived, not too rambling; does what I'm saying about the world below me actually add up to anything? Other writers pay attention to these things as they write the first draft. Either way, an awareness of the macro and micro levels of theme can provide one more tool for thinking about what you should write, and how.