Nancy Kress quotes:

Fiction is about stuff that's screwed up.

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.

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.

Anything said in upper-crust British automatically sounded intelligent.

Conflict is the place where character and plot intersect.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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