Quotes from Sol Stein

Inaccurate similes and metaphors have the effect of deflecting the reader's attention from the story to the words on the page. Yet when carried off, especially when a simile is original and a metaphor sings, there is no greater glory in the practice of words.

The Art & Craft of Novel Writing by Oakley

Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader, not the fact that it's raining, but the feeling of being rained upon." The

Arousal is nature's stimulus for the propagation of the human race. The unaroused male of the species is as useless for that purpose as a worm. Arousal can happen sooner or later, but it must happen.

All of us, in our daily speech to others, are not only trying to communicate information but to get something off our minds and into the consciousness of the listeners. When we write, we put down on paper what we think, know, or believe we know and pay little attention to the effect on the reader. That is discourteous in life and unsuccessful in writing. We practice our craft to service the reader, not our psyches.

The best of good writing will entice us into subjects and knowledge we would have declared were of no interest to us until we were seduced by the language they were dressed in.

Most of the time, tough, combative, adversarial dialogue is much more exciting than physical action.

So many writers fight an uphill battle trying to interest their readers in matters that have no inherent conflict.

A novel is like a car—it won't go anywhere until you turn on the engine. The "engine" of both fiction and nonfiction is the point at which the reader makes the decision not to put the book down. The engine should start in the first three pages, the closer to the top of page one the better.

People who are exactly like other people probably don't exist. But people who seem like most other people litter our lives, and we don't usually seek their company because they are boring. Readers don't read novels in order to experience the boredom they often experience in life. They want to meet interesting people, extraordinary people, preferably people different from anyone they've met before in or out of fiction.

A writer cannot be a Pollyanna. He is in the business of writing what other people think but don't say

A writer has to squelch his emotional reactions consciously in order to get enough distance to use them in his work as a writer.

The secret of creating conflict in scenes you write is to give your characters different scripts.

Suspense is strong glue between the reader and the writing.

You take your reader to the cliff's edge. There you hang your hero by his fingertips. You are not to behave like a compassionate human being. You are not a rescuer. Your job is to avoid rescuing the hero as long as possible. You leave him hanging.

Suspense builds when the reader wants something to happen and it isn't happening yet. Or something is happening and the reader wants it to stop, now. And it doesn't.

Writers are not psychotherapists. Their job is to give readers stress, strain, and pressure.

Dialogue, contrary to popular view, is not a recording of actual speech; it is a semblance of speech, an invented language of exchanges that build in tempo or content toward climaxes.

Dialogue is a lean language in which every word counts.

There is a tendency among people within a profession to use or create words whose meanings are clear only to others within their narrow group and obscure to the rest of the world. This tendency in all specializations is a barrier to communication and a support of self-serving secrecy in an "in" group. Writers have an obligation to defend their language against the assaults of jargon.

If all but one of the instruments on a surgeon's tray had been sterilized, that exception would be a danger to the patient. It can be said that one slip of point of view by a writer can hurt a story badly, and several slips can be fatal.

The reader doesn't want to see your chains and pulleys, he just wants the ride.

In fiction that has a higher aim, the credibility of every important action in the story is at risk unless the writer is confident that the motivation or ability of the character makes the action credible.

Men who write love scenes as if they are dealing with the mechanical parts of an engine should know that such scenes have zero erotic effect and do not accomplish their primary mission of evoking a loving experience between people.