Nancy Kress Quotes & Sayings

Exposition has legitimate uses. It's the most efficient way to summarize background information, including necessary information about a character's history. It can set the stage well for a major dramatized event. — Nancy Kress

Where did the bonds of maternity end? All children grew up, changed, became somebody else. Parents who trembled that they might lose a gap-toothed toddler to some terrible accident ended up losing him anyway, always, to time. The toddlers died, after all, and what was left was a bond with another adult, who had once been the beloved child. — Nancy Kress

The CEO of Monsanto had been disemboweled alive. — Nancy Kress

Things got said, the kinds of embarrassing things that don't go away. Tempers ran high. My paternal grandfather's teak desk required a new panel, which never quite matched the others. Intellectual debate can be very hard on furniture. — Nancy Kress

Readers want to see, hear, feel, smell the action of your story, even if that action is just two people having a quiet conversation. — Nancy Kress

Before the scene, before the paragraph, even before the sentence, comes the word. Individual words and phrases are the building blocks of fiction, the genes that generate everything else. Use the right words, and your fiction can blossom. The French have a phrase for it - le mot juste - the exact right word in the exact right position. — Nancy Kress

A good end cannot sanctify evil means, nor must we ever do evil that good may come of it. — Nancy Kress

An alien had given her his phone number and asked her to wait. It was almost like dating again. — Nancy Kress

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

For commercial books in a genre, readers' and editors' expectations may be fairly rigid. Some romance lines, for instance, issue fairly detailed writers' guidelines explaining exactly what must happen in a book they publish (and what must not). — Nancy Kress

Should you create a protagonist based directly on yourself? The problem with this - and it is a very large problem - is that almost no one can view himself objectively on the page. As the writer, you're too close to your own complicated makeup. — Nancy Kress

The process, not the results, have to be the reason a writer writes. Otherwise, creating a four-hundred-page novel is just too daunting a task. — Nancy Kress

In fiction, a reaction shot is a brief portrayal of how your character reacts to something that someone else has done. In contrast to more direct character building, your guy doesn't initiate the sequence; he completes it. Exactly how he completes it can tell readers a lot about him. — Nancy Kress

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

... Boredom [is] a moral failing, the mark of a mind insufficiently stocked to occupy itself. — Nancy Kress

Readers want to visualize your story as they read it. The more exact words you give them, the more clearly they see it, smell it, hear it, taste it. Thus, a dog should be an 'Airedale,' not just a 'dog.' A taste should not be merely 'good' but 'creamy and sweet' or 'sharply salty' or 'buttery on the tongue.' — Nancy Kress

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

Many novice writers try to avoid using 'said' by substituting synonyms: 'he uttered,' 'she murmured,' 'he questioned.' It's true that any word repeated too often becomes monotonous, but substitutions for 'said' can be worse than its repetition. — Nancy Kress

Overpopulated fiction can be so confusing that readers put the story down. Under-populated novels can seem claustrophobic or boring. You want the right number of characters for your particular work. — Nancy Kress

Questions that require answers are what keep readers going - and the place to start raising those questions is with your very first sentence. — Nancy Kress

When a story is flying along, and I'm so into it that my 'real' world goes away, it can feel magical. I cease to be, my desk and computer ceases to be, and I am my character in his world. Psychologists call this a 'flow state,' and it's better than publication, money, awards, fame. — Nancy Kress

Every drama requires a cast. The cast may be so huge, as in Leo Tolstoy's 'Anna Karenina,' that the author or editor provides a list of characters to keep them straight. Or it may be an intimate cast of two. — Nancy Kress

Fiction is about stuff that's screwed up. — Nancy Kress

A stereotype may be negative or positive, but even positive stereotypes present two problems: They are cliches, and they present a human being as far more simple and uniform than any human being actually is. — Nancy Kress

The worldview implied by literary fiction is complex and ambiguous, trying to be faithful to the complexity and ambiguity of life. — Nancy Kress

Every story makes a promise to the reader. Actually, two promises, one emotional and one intellectual, since the function of stories is to make us both feel and think. — Nancy Kress

In general, fiction is divided into 'literary fiction' and 'commercial fiction.' Nobody can definitively say what separates one from the other, but that doesn't stop everybody (including me) from trying. Your book probably will be perceived as one or the other, and that will affect how it is read, packaged and marketed. — Nancy Kress

Anything said in upper-crust British automatically sounded intelligent. — Nancy Kress

The most-asked question when someone describes a novel, movie or short story to a friend probably is, 'How does it end?' Endings carry tremendous weight with readers; if they don't like the ending, chances are they'll say they didn't like the work. Failed endings are also the most common problems editors have with submitted works. — Nancy Kress

In one sense, every character you create will be yourself. You've never murdered, but your murderer's rage will be drawn from memories of your own extreme anger. Your love scenes will contain hints of your own past kisses and sweet moments. — Nancy Kress

You do not have to dramatize everything. In fact, you usually can't, not without ending up with a half-million-word novel. — Nancy Kress

You have considerable choice in how you end your fiction. For all stories, the basic rule is the same: Choose the type of ending that best suits what's gone before. — Nancy Kress

The strings in her mind grew flatter, calmer. The shapes in the hologrid had changed. She heard the man's words, and yet she didn't; the words were not what was really important. And wasn't that right? Words had never been important, only strings, and the strings had shapes like - but not like -the ones around the man. Only the man had disappeared, too, and that was alright, because she, Miri, Miranda Serena Sharifi, was disappearing, was sliding down a steep long chute and each meter she traveled she became smaller and smaller until she had disappeared and was invisible, a weightless transparent ghost that neither twitched nor stammered, in the corner of a room she had never seen before. — Nancy Kress

All writers, in all viewpoints, must choose which information and scenes will be presented, and in which order. In that sense, the author is always represented as a point of view in a work of fiction. His hand can always be detected by the discerning. — Nancy Kress

Pace, like everything else in writing, involves a trade-off. If you're not offering the reader a lot of action to keep her interested, you must offer something else in its stead. Slow pace is ideal for complex character development, detailed description, and nuances of style. — Nancy Kress

If you're writing a thriller, mystery, Western or adventure-driven book, you'd better keep things moving rapidly for the reader. Quick pacing is vital in certain genres. It hooks readers, creates tension, deepens the drama, and speeds things along. — Nancy Kress

All nonmimetic fiction is a balancing act between 'reality' and the obviously unreal, with no attempt by the author to make the latter seem like the former. Sometimes it's not an easy tightrope to walk. But when it succeeds, such fiction can brilliantly illuminate the human condition. — Nancy Kress

strange attractor - do — Nancy Kress

World-wide warming moved tropical diseases into northern areas which had no defenses against them. — Nancy Kress

Throw enough scientific gibberish at non-scientists and they always faltered. — Nancy Kress

Trust in God was a great excuse for sloth and lack of planning. — Nancy Kress

But children disappeared all the time, — Nancy Kress

The truth is, you have about three paragraphs in a short story, three pages in a novel, to capture that editor's attention enough for her to finish your story. — Nancy Kress

Korsakoff's syndrome, — Nancy Kress

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

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

A true epilogue is removed from the story in time or space. That's the reason it is called an 'Epilogue'; the label serves to alert the reader that the story itself is over, but we are going to now see a distant result or consequence of that story. — Nancy Kress

Slipstream fiction is usually defined as fiction with a contemporary setting in which story elements are mimetic (that is, seem real) - except for one or two eerie strangenesses. Unlike outright fantasy, these are not explained or integrated into an alternate-reality setting. — Nancy Kress

If you consistently write 'The sun set' rather than 'The sun sank slowly in the bright western sky,' your story will move three times as fast. Of course, there are times you want the longer version for atmosphere - but not many. Wordiness not only kills pace; it bores readers. — Nancy Kress

As a writer, you must know what promise your story or novel makes. Your reader will know. — Nancy Kress

How many times have you opened a book, read the first few sentences and made a snap decision about whether to buy it? When it's your book that's coming under this casual-but-critical scrutiny, you want the reader to be instantly hooked. The way to accomplish this is to create compelling opening sentences. — Nancy Kress

Without coffee, nothing gets written. Period. — Nancy Kress

Words change over time. 'Condescending,' for instance, was once a good thing to be. It meant that a person was willing to interact politely with people of lower social ranks. In Jane Austen's world, a lady praised for her condescension was receiving a sincere compliment. — Nancy Kress

Words that add no new information or aren't repeated for emphasis are just padding. A sentence may carry three or five or eight of them, each one as unnoticeable as an extra two ounces on your hips but collectively adding up to a large burden of fat. — Nancy Kress

For the professional writer, stories must be presented as a series of individual scenes, each one dramatized with dialogue and telling descriptions of who is present and what they're all doing. — Nancy Kress

The reader is going to imprint on the characters he sees first. He is going to expect to see these people often, to have them figure largely into the story, possibly to care about them. Usually, this will be the protagonist. — Nancy Kress

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

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

The climax is the place where the opposing forces in your story finally clash. This is true whether those opposing forces are two armies or two values inside a character's soul. — Nancy Kress

grandiose paranoid schizophrenia. — Nancy Kress

No races, few permitted variant alleles. Anything else arouses hostility, — Nancy Kress

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

Without being tiresome. They lacked that all-important dimension of physics: torque. Too much time ahead, too little behind, like a man trying to carry a horizontal ladder with a grip at one end. — Nancy Kress

The parallels between a stage and a book are compelling. You, like all authors, create 'characters' in a 'setting' who speak 'dialogue' encased in 'scenes.' Most importantly, you - like the playwright - have an 'audience.' — Nancy Kress

A brief short story may require only a few paragraphs after the climax. On the other hand, in his massive novel 'The World According to Garp,' John Irving's denouement consisted of 10 separate sections, each devoted to an individual character's fate and each almost a story in itself. — Nancy Kress

If your reader has been given a rousing opening, he will usually then sit still for at least some exposition. But be sure to follow that chunk of telling with one or more dramatized scenes. That's much more effective than being given section after section of telling. — Nancy Kress

Even if your novel occurs in an unfamiliar setting in which all the customs and surroundings will seem strange to your reader, it's still better to start with action. The reason for this is simple. If the reader wanted an explanation of milieu, he would read nonfiction. He doesn't want information. He wants a story. — Nancy Kress

Novels have much more space than short stories, which gives you more leeway with the number of characters you can include. Even 'furniture' characters can be described and given speaking parts to develop background or atmosphere. — Nancy Kress

when I waked, I cried to dream again. — Nancy Kress

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

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

Vision, sometimes called talent, is not a teachable attribute. What — Nancy Kress

Conflict drives fiction; no one wants to read a four-hundred-page novel in which everything rolls along smoothly. — Nancy Kress

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

Religions - most of them, anyway - had promoted self-effacement, sacrifice, restraint. — Nancy Kress

Gail smiled. "A gracious concession. We're not much alike, dear heart."
"Nothing alike."
"So why - "
"Oh, God, not this," Nan said. "Every lover I've ever had has run this program on me eventually. 'Why us?' Why not? And don't go thinking that by that I mean we're just a one night's roll-and-tickle, Gail. I like you. I just don't want to analyze why. Ask me something else. — Nancy Kress

Your opening should give the reader a person to focus on. In a short story, this person should turn up almost immediately; he should be integral to the story's main action; he should be an individual, not just a type. In a novel, the main character may take longer to appear: Anna Karenina doesn't show up in her own novel until chapter eighteen. — Nancy Kress

There are writers whose first drafts are so lean, so skimpy, that they must go back and add words, sentences, paragraphs to make their fiction intelligible or interesting. I don't know any of these writers. — Nancy Kress

Conflict is the place where character and plot intersect. — Nancy Kress

Surreal fiction is a sophisticated art form. Events happen divorced from conventional logic, as events in a dream may happen. But unlike dreams, everything in the story contributes to an overall coherent point, impression or emotion. — Nancy Kress