Dan Becker

“You see again and again the flaws.’ ‘The failing of my hand, yes. The language of the eyes is ever perfect. Rendering it upon stone is where weakness is found.’ ‘These, Ulshun Pral, show few weaknesses.’ ‘Even so…”
― Steven Erikson, Reaper's Gale

“Sometimes the burn is quiet, gradual, unassuming, private. I learned what a short story was in that class. I learned that a story had a beginning, a middle, and an end. That there was voice, point of view, tense, and style. All these things I’d known from consuming novels for a decade and a half, but not on a conscious level.”
― Nnedi Okorafor, Broken Places & Outer Spaces: Finding Creativity in the Unexpected

“But as writers, much of the pleasure of writing is finding our balance. Once we have found our confidence in one type of story, it is not unusual to cast our creative eye toward stories we have never told before and for which we have yet to receive evidence that there are readers as interested in those stories as we are. And so the wobble returns. I know so many writers who have written so many books, and nearly all of them seek a fresh discovery of their confidence with each new story they tell. Sit these authors down privately, and they will share their insecurities with you. Yet it is only a game, really, one that is more interesting when it’s challenging. The insecurity, the wobble, merely reminds us of how interesting it is to find what we know already exists. Discovery never gets dull.”
― William Kenower, Fearless Writing: How to Create Boldly and Write with Confidence

“Endings are where you remember what you actually have. When you come to the end of a story, when you accept that the story did for you what it could, when you let it find its proper conclusion, you often experience a short period of something that feels like sadness. Except it isn’t sadness. In the noisy hurly-burly of your nonwriting life, you’ve mistaken the natural quietness at a story’s end for sadness.”
― William Kenower, Fearless Writing: How to Create Boldly and Write with Confidence