Nancy Kress Character Quotations

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

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

Conflict is the place where character and plot intersect.

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.

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.