Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow: A DIY Manual for the Construction of Stories

HOW TO MANAGE CHRONOLOGY

IT’S INTIMIDATING TO ASK that we know our characters as well as we know our beloveds, but it’s the right aspiration. If a character is proving prickly on a first date, we should be open to considering anything that might help us understand why: romantic history, intimacy issues, the model of love learned from parents.

What generates story is a chain of associations cleaved to a chain of consequence.

We should approach our characters with a passionate curiosity, asking not just What would they do in this situation? But Why are they behaving in this way?

Plot shouldn’t just spur external action. It should expose the internal conflicts that plague your characters.

the people I’m reading about (I don’t really think of them as characters) are behaving precisely as their motives dictate. Even the ones who act cruel and destructive have constructed a worldview in which their actions are justified, even heroic. The author’s job isn’t to absolve any of her major characters, but to reveal them in sufficient depth t

Consider our first encounter with Gatsby, that smile he flashes Nick Carraway, which, we are told, “seemed to face the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself,

THAT’S HOW IT WORKS with strong characterization: the character’s actions register as the inevitable outgrowth of their core identity. It’s important to emphasize the word actions here, because (as Aristotle reminds us) it is action that determines fate.

But most important of all is the structure of the incidents. For Tragedy is an imitation, not of men, but of an action and of life, and life consists in action, and its end is a mode of action, not a quality. Now character determines men’s qualities, but it is by their actions that they are happy or the reverse … If you string together a set of spe