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Kindle Notes & Highlights
What interests readers is not so much what happens, but who things happen to.
A good story takes readers where they haven’t been before in the company of interesting people they learn to care about who are forced to deal with adversity.
memoirs are about traumatic events in a writer’s life that a writer of exquisite skill can transform into an experience we can all share. It is the nearest thing to poetry a writer of prose can create.
You don’t “write what you know,” as the old saw has it; you draw upon what you know. But you write what you read.
The great French film director Jean Renoir (son of the famous painter) once said: “Learning is being able to see the relationship between things.”
To know your desires, and those of your characters, is to be able to exert greater sway over them.
Alice Orr, an agent and author, as well as a terrific teacher, put it best I think: “A villain is still the hero of his own story.”
