POUNDWe spend twelve hundred generations developing so-called civilization to the point where it produces an expert who can offer us salvation from our superstitions, and all we end up with is another superstition! If it...

What monster sleeps in the deep of your story? You need a monster. Without a monster there is no story.

The answer to the question, ‘where’s the drama?’ is another question: ‘what’s the problem?

A mistake is the name we give to any action in which we perceive a difference between what we intended and what has occurred. Intention fuels every dramatic action, including the writing of dramatic stories,...

Originality has nothing to do with producing something ’ new’ – it is about seeking the source, the primordial ground from which you draw and have always drawn your being. It comes about when one...

My dear woman, our greatest problem is that almost everything is a goddamned code. We do not know what is real any more. Every gesture is symbolic. A man cannot shit short of some pundit...

No matter how cleverly we disguise our anxieties they bear witness to the imperfect nature of the human heart. To be is to become. To become is not to be. We are a work-in-progress, incomplete,...

Character is not purchased with a dance in the street. It’s expensive and hard to come by. Though it is the heir of disappointment, betrayal and frustration, it is not the inheritance that matters but...

No one ever developed their character by arranging their experiences in such a way that only ‘good’ things are allowed to happen to them. Character is not purchased with a dance in the street. It...

There’s a chasm between writing about yourself and writing about your personal life. A lot of young writers want to turn their lives into stories, into films, books, because they feel their lives are somehow...

Some writers might tell you that writing is like a piece of magic – a process of creating something out of nothing, and I guess I used to think about it that way too a...

Your audience is your adversary. If you don’t have one get one – imagine it. Imagine it now. To whom is your story addressed and why? Audience is always a creative act of the imagination....