Quotes from Donald Maass

Positive means feeling enjoyment, suspense, amusement, and the satisfaction of what psychologists call belief affirmation—stories turning out as readers believe they should. That requires more than just a happy ending. It means affirming readers' beliefs and validating their morals.

What all that means is that readers fundamentally want to feel something, not about your story, but about themselves. They want to play. They want to anticipate, guess, think, and judge. They want to finish a story and feel competent. They want to feel like they've been through something. They want to connect with your characters and live their fictional experience, or believe that they have. Creating

It takes courage to violate expectations, but sometimes the reward is a new level of success.

What provokes readers to experience their own profound sense of self?

When readers feel strongly, their hearts are open. Your stories can not only reach them for a moment, but they can change them forever.

What shapes us and gives our lives meaning are not the things that happen to us, but their significance. Life lessons, revelations, changes, and growing convictions are what we think of when we ponder who we are. As

Do it. Go there. Take it away, permanently. Deliver the fear. Force the task. Remove all hope. Demand the sacrifice. Enact defeat. Wreck everything. Great endings are built of great climaxes: enormous feats, worst fears, tremendous losses, harrowing sacrifices, utter destruction.

What do we mean when we say "meaning"? For our purposes it's not one thing, a single gem of wisdom. It's the stream of insight, understanding, realization, and acceptance that one continually gains from personal experience, and that adds up to the subjective reality called me. The me in meaning is aimed primarily at seeing the significance of our experiences not for others, but for ourselves. We are philosophers of I. Take

Plot happens outside but story happens inside. Readers won't get the true story, though, unless you put it on the page--both the big meaning in small events, and the overlooked implications of large plot turns.

We are surrounded by symbols and take them for granted. They had to start somewhere, though, and gained their meaning because of historical use, which is suggestive for fiction writers. Anything can be turned into a symbol.

The fact is that roughly two-thirds of all fiction purchases are made because the consumer is already familiar with the author.

A work of fiction grips our imaginations because we care, both about the characters in the tale and about ourselves. To put it another way, we are concerned about the outcome of the story because what is happening to the characters could happen to us.

That said, nothing builds reader involvement more surely than a character whose moral struggle pervades the tale. When readers hope, beg, and plead with you to let a character turn toward the light, you have readers where you want them. A character who is good is good; a character

That said, nothing builds reader involvement more surely than a character whose moral struggle pervades the tale. When readers hope, beg, and plead with you to let a character turn toward the light, you have readers where you want them. A character who is good is good; a character whom we want to be good is even better. Not

It might seem that you shouldn't worry about what readers feel they're either going to feel what you want them to feel or not. But that way of thinking surrenders too much to chance. It leads to the erroneous idea that emotional effect is accidental. While it's true that you cannot control what each reader will feel while reading your work, what you can control is whether they will feel something in the first place and how strong those feelings will be.

We experience life as feelings. It's funny, then, that so much fiction is written to minimize feelings or leave them out altogether. It's as if emotions are not a fit subject or writing about them is too simplistic. Even fiction that celebrates feelings, romance for instance, can sometimes work with only a limited and familiar emotional palette. We can wallow in emotional content yet feel curiously empty.

The arc of moral change isn't complete when change itself arrives. An insight gained, an understanding reached, the end of inner conflict, or the arrival of inner peace are fine, but there is one more step: proof. When a person has changed, we can see it. A selfish person turns selfless. An inward person looks outward. For authors, it's a kind of giving back. When inner peace has arrived, it's time for a transformed character to put good into the world. The

An ironic, snarky, or perky tone can be used to avoid true intimacy with readers. Literary writing isn't necessarily intimate, either. A life "closely observed" doesn't mean we'll care about it.

Thus, creating big feelings in readers requires laying a foundation on top of which readers build their own towering experience. What is that foundation? The more precise question is, what triggers readers to dredge up their own emotional experiences? One answer is this: It's the small details (reminders) used to evoke a situation that are preloaded with feeling.

Beautiful writing may sparkle like a diamond necklace, but sparkling isn't a feeling.

The first task in building a compelling story world is to create hope.

Dive from a high platform, walk a country lane, watch your computer freeze, cross a finish line, hear your morning alarm, look for a parking space, toast on your anniversary, embrace a friend after a funeral. As you live your life, what do you feel? Terror, serenity, frustration, relief, groaning reluctance, patient endurance, pride, satisfaction, or a grief made bearable because somehow life will go on. We experience life as feelings.

What the novelist is doing, though, is not causing readers to feel as the novelist does, or as his characters do, but rather inducing for each reader a unique emotional journey through a story.

Longing is different than need. Needing to solve plot problems can kick protagonists into action, but that's not the same thing as forging a human bond. What does that is inner yearning.