How to Write a Damn Good Novel Quotes

“Writer's block is real. It happens. Some days you sit down at the
old typewriter, put your fingers on the keys, and nothing pops
into your head. Blanko. Nada. El nothingissimo. What you do
when this happens is what separates you from the one-of-thesedays-
I'm-gonna-write-a-book crowd.”
― James N. Frey, How to Write a Damn Good Novel: A Step-by-Step No Nonsense Guide to Dramatic Storytelling

“To set a forest on fire, you light a match. To set a character on fire, you put him in conflict.”
― James N. Frey, How to Write a Damn Good Novel: A Step-by-Step No Nonsense Guide to Dramatic Storytelling

“Fiction can be more real to the reader than reality itself because fiction is the essence of life”
― James N. Frey, How to Write a Damn Good Novel: A Step-by-Step No Nonsense Guide to Dramatic Storytelling

“It has been said that Ernest Hemingway would rewrite scenes
until they pleased him, often thirty or forty times. Hemingway,
critics claimed, was a genius. Was it his genius that drove
him to work hard, or was it hard work that resulted in works
of genius?”
― James N. Frey, How to Write a Damn Good Novel: A Step-by-Step No Nonsense Guide to Dramatic Storytelling

“For some it is harder to
write a novel than to row a bathtub across the North Atlantic.”
― James N. Frey, How to Write a Damn Good Novel: A Step-by-Step No Nonsense Guide to Dramatic Storytelling

“You can kill the spell of identification just as easily as you
can create it—if you lose the readers' sympathy for the character.
You can lose reader sympathy by having your character commit
acts of cruelty to another character with whom the readers identify
more strongly or for whom they have strong sympathy. You
can lose reader sympathy by having the character make dumb
choices—acting at less than maximum capacity. The idiot in
the horror story who responds to creepy noises by going into
the attic armed only with a candle is an example. You can lose
reader sympathy when a character seems too ordinary, is stereotyped,
or doesn't struggle hard enough. The reader wants to
cheer a fighter, not witness a milquetoast wallowing in, say, selfpity.”
― James N. Frey, How to Write a Damn Good Novel: A Step-by-Step No Nonsense Guide to Dramatic Storytelling

“Novel writing is like heroin addiction; it takes everything you've got.”
― James N. Frey, How to Write a Damn Good Novel: A Step-by-Step No Nonsense Guide to Dramatic Storytelling

“Before you go ahead with a flashback, ask yourself if you can
make the same impact on your reader through conflict in the
now of the novel. If the answer is no, then the flashback is
necessary, but remember that within the flashback all the same
principles of good dramatic storytelling which apply in the now
of your story—fully rounded characters, a rising conflict, inner
conflicts, and so on—continue to apply.”
― James N. Frey, How to Write a Damn Good Novel: A Step-by-Step No Nonsense Guide to Dramatic Storytelling

“Readers find most flashbacks
intolerable. Yet a lot of neophyte writers flash back like mad.
Why? No one but the Creator of the Universe knows for sure,
but there is a likely answer: they find the conflicts in the "now"
of the story produce anxiety in themselves.”
― James N. Frey, How to Write a Damn Good Novel: A Step-by-Step No Nonsense Guide to Dramatic Storytelling

“A story is a narrative of consequential events involving worthy human characters who change as a result of those events. THE”
― James N. Frey, How to Write a Damn Good Novel: A Step-by-Step No Nonsense Guide to Dramatic Storytelling