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.
A writer writes what other people only think.
A reader's emotions can be sparked with few words. That's the power of dialogue.
Readers, transformed by film and TV, are used to seeing stories. The reading experience . . . is increasingly visual.
The expert magician seeks to deceive the mind, rather than the eye.
A lawyer's job is to manipulate the skeletons in other people's closets.