JOHN FENZEL

Mark Twain on Congress...

Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But I repeat myself.

-Mark Twain

Jeffery Deaver on Outlining...

An Interview with Margaret Atwood

Kurt Vonnegut's 8 Basics of Creative Writing...

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Believe...

Twain and Camus on Writing...

"My works are like water. The works of the great masters are like wine. But everybody drinks water."
– Mark Twain

"Those who write clearly have readers; those who write obscurely have commentators." – Albert Camus

Kurt Vonnegut: Eight rules for writing fiction

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

4. Every sentence must do one of two things -- reveal character or advance the action.

5. Start as close to the end as possible.

6. Be a sadist. Now matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them -- in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

-- Vonnegut, Kurt Vonnegut, Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons 1999), 9-10.

Tolstoy's Insights on Storytelling...

Ilya Repin. Leo Tolstoy in His Study. 1891. Oil on canvas. The State Literature Museum, Moscow, Russia.

"The best stories don't come from "good vs. bad" but from "good vs. good."

– Leo Tolstoy

What Makes the Best Villains...

"What interests me…it's the same thing when we were talking about Bourne and people say, 'Oh, there's all this paranoia and there's all this government conspiracy and there's all this external force,' and it's the same thing in Clayton. There's paranoia and there's corporate…but to me, that's really not what there is to be frightened at in these movies. I mean the villain in these movies is what's inside. It's the interior villain. The villain is really inside Jason Bourne, the villain really inside Michael Clayton, the villain is inside. It's the decisions."

– Michael Clayton's Tony Gilroy

Capote on the Value of Revisions...

"I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil."
– Truman Capote