Quotes from Chuck Wendig

You can feel good about failure. Failure means you did something. You finished the story even if it wasn't what you'd hoped. Failure means you're learning. Growing. Doing.

Remember: a story is not a vignette. It has a beginning, middle and an end. It is not merely a snapshot in time.

He is less a human-shaped thing and more a pulsing, living band of light. Light that sometimes dims, that sometimes is thrust through with a vein of darkness. She tells herself that it's normal—Luke said to her, Leia, we all have that. He explained that the brighter the light, the darker the shadow. Right

Hell, nobody's okay. Maybe we never were, and we damn sure aren't now. But we're here. Until we're not. And that's all I find it fair to ask for.

Dialogue is a little bit jazz, a little bit hand-to-hand combat.

Old books, the kind that give off the smell of dust and decay, an odor Balastair associates with the scent of pure knowledge. Knowledge of new things. Knowledge of new places. Every book a doorway—a cabinet of curiosities opening to a new land.

how do you steal a Republic? By convincing its people that they cannot govern themselves—that freedom is their enemy and that fear is their ally.

Question marks are shaped like hooks for a reason: they will hook the reader and drag them deeper into the story

Fine. Whatever. She's so unpleasant. Beautiful, sure, but it's like putting a dress on a badger. Pretty dress. Nice face. Still a badger.

The droid stands up. Servomotors whir as it regards its repaired arm—an arm that's not so much an arm as it is an astromech leg. It spins the leg around, slow at first, then faster and faster until it's just a blur. "THIS IS NOT MY ARM." "I know, Bones. Sorry." "THIS IS AN ASTROMECH LEG." "No, no, I know." "ASTROMECHS ARE INFERIOR. THEY ARE BEEPING BOOPING TRASH CANS. I AM MADE INFERIOR BY THE INCLUSION OF THIS NON-ARM.

Every story's trying to say something. It's trying to beam an idea, a message, into the minds of the readers. In this way, every story is an argument. It's the writer making a case.

Repeat the mantra: Writing is when I make the words. Editing is when I make them not shitty.

And the New Republic or the New-New Republic or the Republic We Got This Week will clamp down hard and then those people with the so-called better way will become the brave rebel alliance and the Republic will become the enemy and the wheel will turn once more.

War is not a state of being. It is meant to be a temporary chaos between periods of peace. Some want it to be a course of things: a default fact of existence. But I will not let that be so.

I am going to do what every wife must do now and again, she says. I am going to go rescue my husband.

Thanks, Darth Obvious. Or is it Emperor Palpable?

Princess Leia's baby, he knows, will have a good life. The best life.

If ever she is to die, it should be out here, in space. Born from stardust, returned to stardust.

Humankind was a disease. The earth was the body. Climate change was the fever.

She gets on her tippy-toes and kisses him. Long, slow, deep. The kind of kiss where you can feel little pieces of your soul trading places as mouths open and breath mingles.

But God was never about power over us. It was about the power we possessed to either be good and in His graces, or be selfish and wretched in His shadow. So to speak. Hell is being in that shadow. It's not in the next world, but this one, right now, anytime you choose not to do the right thing.

In the darkness, a red lightsaber rises from its hilt.

They don't ask, How do we stop bullies? Instead those assholes say, How can we get these stupid kids to stop painting bull's-eyes on their foreheads? They put the blame on the victims, not the victimizers.

Stormtroopers were literally supposed to be within the same range of height and weight in part because of exactly that—he wasn't joking when he said he was too tall to be a stormtrooper.