Quotes from Nancy Kress

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.

Many novice writers try to avoid using 'said' by substituting synonyms: 'he uttered,' 'she murmured,' 'he questioned.' It's true that any word repeated too often becomes monotonous, but substitutions for 'said' can be worse than its repetition.

The process, not the results, have to be the reason a writer writes. Otherwise, creating a four-hundred-page novel is just too daunting a task.

Questions that require answers are what keep readers going - and the place to start raising those questions is with your very first sentence.

A brief short story may require only a few paragraphs after the climax. On the other hand, in his massive novel 'The World According to Garp,' John Irving's denouement consisted of 10 separate sections, each devoted to an individual character's fate and each almost a story in itself.

Words change over time. 'Condescending,' for instance, was once a good thing to be. It meant that a person was willing to interact politely with people of lower social ranks. In Jane Austen's world, a lady praised for her condescension was receiving a sincere compliment.

The most-asked question when someone describes a novel, movie or short story to a friend probably is, 'How does it end?' Endings carry tremendous weight with readers; if they don't like the ending, chances are they'll say they didn't like the work. Failed endings are also the most common problems editors have with submitted works.

Conflict drives fiction; no one wants to read a four-hundred-page novel in which everything rolls along smoothly.

How many times have you opened a book, read the first few sentences and made a snap decision about whether to buy it? When it's your book that's coming under this casual-but-critical scrutiny, you want the reader to be instantly hooked. The way to accomplish this is to create compelling opening sentences.

The truth is, you have about three paragraphs in a short story, three pages in a novel, to capture that editor's attention enough for her to finish your story.

this kind of story intrinsically satisfying.

The art of fiction, like the art of stage magicians, is one of directing the audience's attention to what you want them to see.

character with both progressive motivation and internal changes, congratulations.

Why do law-abiding and productive human beings owe anything to those who neither produce very much nor abide by just laws? What philosophical or economic or spiritual justification is there for owing then anything? ...The question gaped beneath her, but she didn't try to evade it. I don't know. I just know we do.

Something about the United States seemed to provide a fertile medium for culturing hate groups, irrational scapegoats, mass shootings, and the blame game.

But you have no religious faith. Richard had said, smiling, you're not even a believer. Jennifer hadn't tried to explain to him that religious belief was not the point. The will to believe created its own power, its own faith, and, ultimately, its own will. Through the practice of faith, whatever its specific rituals, one brought into existence the object of that faith. The believer became the Creator.

But never before in the United States had the objects of envy and the objects of biological prejudice been the same group.

But you know, I get tired of these overwhelming physical presences like your Mr. Hawke. All charisma and outsized ego, using the intensity of their beliefs to hit you like a fist. It's wearing.

Vision, sometimes called talent, is not a teachable attribute. What

An alien had given her his phone number and asked her to wait. It was almost like dating again.

flop-transition

A stereotype may be negative or positive, but even positive stereotypes present two problems: They are cliches, and they present a human being as far more simple and uniform than any human being actually is.

Hausdorff dimension

In fact, without believable and interesting characters, you don't really have fiction at all. You may have names walking through plot, but without the essential animation of character, a historical novel becomes mostly a history text, a mystery becomes a police report, and science fiction becomes a speculative monograph. Literary fiction simply becomes unread. Character