Monica Wood famous quotes

It's often hard to determine, especially in early drafts, whether or not a story has a bona fide complication. Remember this: A complication must either illuminate, thwart, or alter what the character wants. A good complication puts emotional pressure on a character, promoting that character not only to act, but to act with purpose.If the circumstance does none of these things, then it's not a complication at all - it's a situation. This situation, or setup, might be interesting or even astonishing, but it gives the story no point of departure.
-- Monica Wood

#Character #Writing #Emotional

A well-chosen complication should give you choices. Juggling choices for your characters is what makes writing fun, after all. If you discover that you're struggling more than you ought to with a draft, perhaps you've run out of interesting choices, or have given yourself too few choices to begin with. Go back to the complication, fatten it up, and start over.
-- Monica Wood

#Running #Fun #Struggle

Every good story needs a complication. We learn this fiction-writing fundamental in courses and workshops, by reading a lot or, most painfully, through our own abandoned story drafts. After writing twenty pages about a harmonious family picnic, say, or a well-received rock concert, we discover that a story without a complication flounders, no matter how lovely the prose. A story needs a point of departure, a place from which the character can discover something, transform himself, realize a truth, reject a truth, right a wrong, make a mistake, come to terms.
-- Monica Wood

#Mistake #Reading #Character

I'm involved in some action scenes, so they'll train me for that. I'll be working with my acting coach to prepare for my character.

I never really thought of myself as being an action hero or a leading man, or any of that. I'm a character actor.

If the English language had been properly organized ... then there would be a word which meant both 'he' and 'she', and I could write, 'If John or Mary comes heesh will want to play tennis', which would save a lot of trouble.

My spelling is Wobbly. It's good spelling but it Wobbles, and the letters get in the wrong places.

It came about as follows: over the years when I was involved in dianetics, I wrote the beginnings of many stories. I would get an idea, and then write the beginning, and then never touch it again.

Science fiction is a field of writing where, month after month, every printed word implies to hundreds of thousands of people: 'There is change. Look, today's fantastic story is tomorrow's fact.

I can write better than anyone who can write faster,

If the first requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite, the second is to put in your apprenticeship as a feeder when you have enough money to pay the check but not enough to produce indifference of the total.

Well, guys are better at mechanical stuff and women are better at emotional stuff.

Humility is born of the spirit, humiliation of the ego.