Quotes from James N. Frey

Writer's block is real. It happens. Some days you sit down at the old typewriter, put your fingers on the keys, and nothing pops into your head. Blanko. Nada. El nothingissimo. What you do when this happens is what separates you from the one-of-thesedays- I'm-gonna-write-a-book crowd.

To set a forest on fire, you light a match. To set a character on fire, you put him in conflict.

Fiction can be more real to the reader than reality itself because fiction is the essence of life

For some it is harder to write a novel than to row a bathtub across the North Atlantic.

It has been said that Ernest Hemingway would rewrite scenes until they pleased him, often thirty or forty times. Hemingway, critics claimed, was a genius. Was it his genius that drove him to work hard, or was it hard work that resulted in works of genius?

Novel writing is like heroin addiction; it takes everything you've got.

Readers find most flashbacks intolerable. Yet a lot of neophyte writers flash back like mad. Why? No one but the Creator of the Universe knows for sure, but there is a likely answer: they find the conflicts in the "now" of the story produce anxiety in themselves.

Before you go ahead with a flashback, ask yourself if you can make the same impact on your reader through conflict in the now of the novel. If the answer is no, then the flashback is necessary, but remember that within the flashback all the same principles of good dramatic storytelling which apply in the now of your story—fully rounded characters, a rising conflict, inner conflicts, and so on—continue to apply.

A story is a narrative of consequential events involving worthy human characters who change as a result of those events. THE

You will never work through writer's block if you walk away from your typewriter. That will only make it easier to walk away the next time.