“[I]t’s impossible to separate character from plot from setting. The body is the apparatus of plot. The body is what characters use to do things.”

Elizabeth McCracken, in A Long Game

Paraphrasing the hosts of the podcast Writing Excuses, someplace in season 19: When I say a narrative needs risk, it almost always needs a relationship. How does the failure affect the community around the character? People feel tension about things they can relate to, especially about things they can relate to being taken away from characters.

Now, as the present crumbles away into a future that evolves more quickly than most of us can track, it seems impossible to write about contemporary life without writing science fiction. But the secret to doing it well doesn’t lie in suspenseful chase scenes, weighty messages, or mind-blowing existential puzzles. That stuff can be fun, but it can also feel pretty thin without something that’s supposed to be a specialty of literary novelists: the fullest appreciation of humanity in its infinite variety and intricacy. Do justice to that, and the wonders will take care of themselves. 

Laura Miller

The goal of writing should be to produce something that feels like a spontaneous joyful outpouring but that is, on closer inspection, too finely made to be (merely) that—the story as fossil evidence of a deep process of exploration that, in our reading experience of it, is as fast and natural as a pop song.

George Saunders

If there’s a book you really want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.

–Toni Morrison

A novel takes a while to write. This one [A Wizard of Earthsea] went pretty quickly and easily, though I didn’t have a plot outlined out when I started, but I knew what the story was. I knew who my Sparrowhawk was, and in a general way I knew where he was going—where he had to go, not only to learn to be a wizard, but to learn to be Ged. Then, as I wrote his story, what he did and said, where he went and the people he met, showed me and told me what he had to do and where he had to go next.

Ursala K. LeGuin

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy–they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made . . .

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

It’s a nice big fat philosophical question . . . how do you get through? Sometimes you don’t survive whole, you just survive in part. But the grandeur of life is that attempt. It’s not about that solution. It is about being as fearless as one can, and behaving as beautifully as one can, under completely impossible circumstances. It’s that, that makes it elegant. Good is just more interesting, more complex, more demanding. Evil is silly, it may be horrible, but at the same time it’s not a compelling idea. It’s predictable. It needs a tuxedo, it needs a headline, it needs blood, it needs fingernails. It needs all that costume in order to get anybody’s attention. But the opposite, which is survival, blossoming, endurance, those things are just more compelling intellectually if not spiritually, and they certainly are spiritually. This is a more fascinating job. We are already born, we are going to die. So you have to do something interesting that you respect in between.

–Toni Morrison