Best 16 quotes of Nancy Kress on MyQuotes

Nancy Kress

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    Nancy Kress

    Anything said in upper-crust British automatically sounded intelligent.

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    Nancy Kress

    Changers are characters who alter in significant ways as a result of the events of your story. They learn something or grow into better or worse people, but by the end of the story they are not the same personalities they were in the beginning. Their change, in its various stages, is called the story's emotional arc.

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    Nancy Kress

    Characterization is not divorced from plot, not a coat of paint you slap on after the structure of events is already built. Rather characterization is inseparable from plot.

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    Nancy Kress

    Conflict is the place where character and plot intersect.

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    Nancy Kress

    Every paragraph should accomplish two goals: advance the story, and develop your characters as complex human beings.

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    Nancy Kress

    Fiction is about stuff that's screwed up.

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    Nancy Kress

    In commercial fiction especially, everything in the story usually contributes directly to the plot The shorter the story, the truer this is

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    Nancy Kress

    Religious reverence for one's own job, even if the job is worth doing, is a sexual turnoff.

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    Nancy Kress

    Some writers find that they don't know their themes until they've finished the first draft (I am one). They then rewrite with an eye toward balancing on that tightrope: not too contrived, not too rambling; does what I'm saying about the world below me actually add up to anything? Other writers pay attention to these things as they write the first draft. Either way, an awareness of the macro and micro levels of theme can provide one more tool for thinking about what you should write, and how.

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    Nancy Kress

    Technology is Darwinian. It spreads. It evolves. It adapts. The most dangerous wipes out the less fit.

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    Nancy Kress

    There are two wrong reactions to a rejection slip: deciding it's a final judgment on your story and/or talent, and deciding it's no judgment on your story and/or talent.

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    Nancy Kress

    What characters do must grow out of who they are, and who they are is, in turn, influenced by what you make happen to them.

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    Nancy Kress

    You must learn to be three people at once: writer, character, and reader.

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    Nancy Kress

    But you have no religious faith." Richard had said, smiling, "you're not even a believer." Jennifer hadn't tried to explain to him that religious belief was not the point. The will to believe created its own power, its own faith, and, ultimately, its own will. Through the practice of faith, whatever its specific rituals, one brought into existence the object of that faith. The believer became the Creator.

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    Nancy Kress

    ...neither of them has yet learned to accept hard necessity without making it worse by regret. That's a vital lesson, Miri. Regret is not productive. Nor is guilt, nor grief.

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    Nancy Kress

    Things got said, the kinds of embarrassing things that don't go away. Tempers ran high. My paternal grandfather's teak desk required a new panel, which never quite matched the others. Intellectual debate can be very hard on furniture.