Take Off Your Pants! Outline Your Books for Faster, Better Writing Quotes

“The character’s flaw will shape every other aspect of your book. The flaw is the engine that drives your entire book, from hooking your reader’s interest to propelling the plot to its climax—so choose your flaw with care, and make it count.”
― Libbie Hawker, Take Off Your Pants! Outline Your Books for Faster, Better Writing

“When the audience understands that the main character has a very serious need to change his own heart and mind, the hook is set, and the audience is irrevocably invested.”
― Libbie Hawker, Take Off Your Pants! Outline Your Books for Faster, Better Writing

“The Story Core Every compelling story has the following five elements: 1)       A character 2)     The character wants something 3)      But something prevents him from getting what he wants easily 4)     So he struggles against that force 5)     And either succeeds or fails”
― Libbie Hawker, Take Off Your Pants! Outline Your Books for Faster, Better Writing

“A story is a character arc—a personality making a progression from an emotional or psychological Point A to an emotional or psychological Point B. Story is all about internal growth, not external events. It’s a character’s struggle to shed old behaviors or beliefs that have held him back from becoming his “true self”—the person he was always “meant to be.”
― Libbie Hawker, Take Off Your Pants! Outline Your Books for Faster, Better Writing

“Plot is certainly a part of constructing a story. It’s a factor in outlining. But believe it or not, it’s the least important factor. If you focus your efforts on the Three Legs—character arc, pacing, and theme—you can change the specifics of the plot a hundred different times, and you’ll still have essentially the same story.”
― Libbie Hawker, Take Off Your Pants! Outline Your Books for Faster, Better Writing

“Make your character flawed in a serious, big, scary, potentially life-wrecking way. When you start with a badly flawed character, the arc will be all about correcting that flaw—about your character growing into a better person, the kind of mythic hero archetype he was “meant to be” but couldn’t become until this adventure—the events of your plot—pushed him to change himself for the better.”
― Libbie Hawker, Take Off Your Pants! Outline Your Books for Faster, Better Writing

“A tight pace has nothing to do with explosions or car chases. It has everything to do with creating a compulsion to keep on reading, even when your reader has other things she really ought to be doing.”
― Libbie Hawker, Take Off Your Pants! Outline Your Books for Faster, Better Writing

“If you’re comfortable with your method and it delivers results you like, then it works for you, and you shouldn’t fix what isn’t broken.”
― Libbie Hawker, Take Off Your Pants! Outline Your Books for Faster, Better Writing

“Even readers who think they only want to read 100% original fiction, totally unlike anything else that’s ever been done before, are mistaken. The human mind is drawn like a magnet to established story patterns. That’s why the “hero’s journey” pattern of ancient myth has persisted throughout all of human history.”
― Libbie Hawker, Take Off Your Pants! Outline Your Books for Faster, Better Writing

“You might think it’s better to prove to your reader that your book is unlike anything else out there—that this is a totally unique reading experience that doesn’t have any similarity to any other story. I hate to break it to you, but that’s a losing game. Even readers who think they only want to read 100% original fiction, totally unlike anything else that’s ever been done before, are mistaken. The human mind is drawn like a magnet to established story patterns. That’s why the “hero’s journey” pattern of ancient myth has persisted throughout all of human history.”
― Libbie Hawker, Take Off Your Pants! Outline Your Books for Faster, Better Writing

“The struggle to grow, to learn how to be a better”
― Libbie Hawker, Take Off Your Pants! Outline Your Books for Faster, Better Writing

“I can hear some of you groaning as you read this section. “Great,” you’re saying. “I have to put a theme in my book? Themes are only for that ‘high literature’ stuff that gets taught in universities, not for my nice, entertaining genre fiction.”
― Libbie Hawker, Take Off Your Pants! Outline Your Books for Faster, Better Writing