I read and write stories that interest me. The stories I've enjoyed run the range from young adult to SF/F to mystery to romance.
When a story is well done, people will enjoy it regardless of its genre.
"I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center." –Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007)
"I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, 'The Beatles did'. " –Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake
"Remember the quiet wonders. The world has more need of them than it has for warriors." -Charles de Lint
"Fiction is a lie. Good fiction is the truth in a lie." -Stephen King
"Truth is a matter of the imagination." -Ursula K. LeGuin
"To know how to say what others only know how to think makes men poets or sages; and to dare to say what others only dare to think, makes men martyrs or reformers - or both." -Elizabeth Charles
"If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people." -Virginia Woolf
"The first draft of anything is shit." -Ernest Hemingway
"Writing is easy; all you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead." -Gene Fowler
"Everyone should carefully observe which way his heart draws him and then choose that way with all his strength." -Hasidic Proverb
"You must kill your darlings." -William Faulkner
"Easy reading is damn hard writing." -Nathaniel Hawthorne
"I only write when I am inspired. Fortunately I am inspired at 9 o'clock every morning." -William Faulkner
"Compelling characters and writing transcend category." -Boris Layupan
"Every writer I know has trouble writing." –Joseph Heller
"When I was really young I didn't know that there was such a thing as a screenwriter. I wrote stories." –John Sayles
"I have experience as a production rewriter and [have] been in those situations before, so in that regards, it was familiar territory. I feel sorry for directors that don't have that skill set, because as I've seen again and again, as they start screwing around with lines and they don't realize there's a ripple effect and now page 70 and 105 have to get rewritten because they started to adlib something. The writer is really the keeper of the tome, the scribe in a movie, so in that regards, I can't really feed them lines and not worry about destroying something else. That was the funnest part. I'd be like, 'Here's your new lines, action, now go.' And lo and behold, it worked." -David Ayer, when asked whether he was better able to make script changes on set during his directorial debut, Harsh Times
"Bryan hates the idea of 100 writers on a project, 100 monkeys. The story becomes even more diluted. It's not a creative driven project it becomes a studio driven project. The closer you are with your writers the better. Peter Jackson has the same relationship obviously with Fran Walsh and Phillipa Boyens. He likes that director/writer collaboration, if it's not going to be the same person it should be the closest people on the production." -Superman Returns' Mike Dougherty, on working with Bryan Singer
"To me, the goal of writing a drama is to make it as truthful as possible. Sometimes, I'll outline [the story] and that seems like how I should write it. But once you start writing it, it goes in a very different direction because once you start really discovering the truth about these characters and how they would truthfully interact, it may become a different movie. You have to be open to that." -Just My Luck's Marlene King, on following where the story leads
"Set-up and payoff. You've got to establish all your threats and all your characters right away; basically what's going to happen has to be foreshadowed early in the film. If you've done your work correctly, all those elements will come together so that you have a climactic payoff at the end. It shouldn't be ambiguous, it should be straightforward." -Snakes on a Plane's John Heffernan, when asked what the most crucial element to crafting an action script is
If this generates a title of a book or short story already in existence, I assure you, it was completely random. If it generates a title you'd like to use, go right ahead! A word of thanks to those people who have created Javascript tutorials or put sample scripts up for people like me to see and learn from. (NOTE: There are a lot of words in this, some adult in nature. Just words, folks!)
