13 Quotes by Donald Maass

Beautiful writing is more than pretty prose. It creates resonance in readers’ minds with parallels, reversals, and symbols. It conjures a story world that is unique, highly detailed, and brought alive by the characters that dwell there. It offers moments of breath-catching surprise, heart-gripping insight, revelation, and self-understanding. It engages the reader’s mind with an urgent point, which we might call theme.

Plot happens outside but story happens inside. Readers won't get the true story, though, unless you put it on the page--both the big meaning in small events, and the overlooked implications of large plot turns.

It takes courage to violate expectations, but sometimes the reward is a new level of success.

To infuse a novel with a significance that speaks to many requires, paradoxically, that you ignore what the public wants and focus instead on what matters to you.

The first task in building a compelling story world is to create hope.

Longing is different than need. Needing to solve plot problems can kick protagonists into action, but that’s not the same thing as forging a human bond. What does that is inner yearning.

In short, a premise is any single image, moment, feeling, or belief that has enough power and personal meaning for the author to set her story on fire, and propel it like a rocket for hundreds of pages.

What the novelist is doing, though, is not causing readers to feel as the novelist does, or as his characters do, but rather inducing for each reader a unique emotional journey through a story.

Beautiful writing may sparkle like a diamond necklace, but sparkling isn’t a feeling.