Gems from Charlie Jane Anders in the writing craft book Never Say You Can't Survive: How to Get Through Hard Times By Making Up Stories (Tordotcom, 2021).
About personal change over time, how we piece together reality in the moment and, later, in retrospect.
— "A story can show change happening in real time." (Chapter 8)
— "People often talk about characters having an 'arc,' which brings to mind the image of an arrow shot in the air, curving upward only to come down again. But another useful image is a piece of coal coming under immense pressure and becoming a diamond. People don't change when life is easy and straightforward — they change when life is a bloody confusing nightmare." (Chapter 8)
— "The texture of reality is made out of random details, and it's especially weird what you'll notice when your emotions are working overtime. You might be in the middle of a relationship-ending fight with your partner, but your eye might land on a tiny candy wrapper on the sidewalk..." (Chapter 15)
— Writing is "like doing a jigsaw puzzle where we have to carve the pieces as we assemble them, and some of the pieces will turn out to belong to a different puzzle entirely." (Chapter 16)
— "I usually feel like every story has a point where it stops pushing uphill, and starts rolling downhill. ... So a good structure will not only let the reader know what the big turning points in the story are, but show how the consequences of those turning points are piling up. This is a big part of why I say the ending is the beginning: once you have an ending that you love, that feels like it pays off the themes and the character arcs of your whole story, then you can go back and shape all that raw material into something where every moment serves to build up power that you can discharge at the end." (Chapter 24)
© Free Art License Wikimedia Commons.
No comments:
Post a Comment