“Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.”
“Start as close to the end as possible”
“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.”
“Every successful creative person creates with an audience of one in mind. That’s the secret of artistic unity. … If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.”
“Make characters want something right away — even if it’s only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.”
“When you exclude plot, when you exclude anyone’s wanting anything, you exclude the reader, which is a mean-spirited thing to do.”
“It’s the writer’s job to stage confrontations, so the characters will say surprising and revealing things, and educate and entertain us all.”
“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.”