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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Anything said in upper-crust British automatically sounded intelligent.