Our instinct as human beings is to provide answers, to ease tension. As writers our job is the opposite, to create tension and not dispel it immediately.

Most of the time, tough, combative, adversarial dialogue is much more exciting than physical action.

Readers, transformed by film and TV, are used to seeing stories. The reading experience . . . is increasingly visual.

The biggest difference between a writer and a would-be writer is their attitude toward rewriting. . . . Unwillingness to revise usually signals an amateur.

A writer writes what other people only think.

In our not-yet-acknowledged secret garden lie the seeds of some of our best not-yet-written stories

Readers take in dialogue one thought at a time. A frequent mistake of beginners is to combine thoughts, which may be suitable for other forms of writing but not for dialogue. Another mistake is speechifying. Three sentences at a time is tops, yet many beginners write speeches that go on and on.