Nancy Kress Quotes

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

  Nancy Kress

  Character, Writing, Two

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• Fiction is about stuff that's screwed up.

  Nancy Kress

  Writing, Fiction, Stuff

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• 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.

  Nancy Kress

  Events, Plot, Coats

  Nancy Kress (2004). “Dynamic Characters”, p.4, Writer's Digest Books

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• 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.

  Nancy Kress

  Character, Creation, Turns

  Nancy Kress (2004). “Dynamic Characters”, p.5, Writer's Digest Books

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

  Nancy Kress

  Character, People, Three

  Nancy Kress (2005). “Write Great Fiction - Characters, Emotion & Viewpoint”, p.7, Writer's Digest Books

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

  Nancy Kress

  Technology, Wipe, Fit

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• 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.

  Nancy Kress

  Character, Emotional, People

  Nancy Kress (2005). “Write Great Fiction - Characters, Emotion & Viewpoint”, p.18, Writer's Digest Books

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• 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.

  Nancy Kress

  Two, Rejection, Finals

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• You think intelligence and grit can succeed by themselves, but I'm telling you that's a pretty illusion.

  Nancy Kress

  Thinking, Grit, Succeed

  Nancy Kress (2009). “Steal Across the Sky”, p.12, Macmillan

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

  Nancy Kress

  Writing, Plot, Fiction

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• Conflict is the place where character and plot intersect.

  Nancy Kress

  Character, Plot, Conflict

  Nancy Kress (2004). “Dynamic Characters”, p.159, Writer's Digest Books

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• 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.

  Nancy Kress

  Eye, Writing, Thinking

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

  Nancy Kress

  Religious, Jobs, Reverence

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• Anything said in upper-crust British automatically sounded intelligent.

  Nancy Kress

  Intelligent, British, Said

  Nancy Kress (2014). “Yesterday's Kin”, p.9, Tachyon Publications

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