Donald Maass > Quotes

“Beautiful writing may sparkle like a diamond necklace, but sparkling isn’t a feeling.”
― Donald Maass, The Emotional Craft of Fiction: How to Write the Story Beneath the Surface

“The first task in building a compelling story world is to create hope.”
― Donald Maass, The Emotional Craft of Fiction: How to Write the Story Beneath the Surface

“For me, where genre ends and literature begins doesn’t matter. What matters is whether a given novel hits me with high impact. If it does, it probably is fulfilling the purpose of fiction. It has drawn me into a story world, held me captive, taken me on a journey with characters like none I’ve ever met, revealed truths I’ve somehow always known and insights that rock my brain. It’s filled me with awe, which is to say it’s made me see the familiar in a wholly new way and made the unfamiliar a foundational part of me. It both entertains and matters. It both captures our age and becomes timelessly great. It does all that with the sturdy tools of story and the flair of narrative art.”
― Donald Maass, Writing 21st Century Fiction: High Impact Techniques for Exceptional Storytelling

“Longing is different than need. Needing to solve plot problems can kick protagonists into action, but that’s not the same thing as forging a human bond. What does that is inner yearning.”
― Donald Maass, The Emotional Craft of Fiction: How to Write the Story Beneath the Surface

“Beautiful writing is more than pretty prose. It creates resonance in readers’ minds with parallels, reversals, and symbols. It conjures a story world that is unique, highly detailed, and brought alive by the characters that dwell there. It offers moments of breath-catching surprise, heart-gripping insight, revelation, and self-understanding. It engages the reader’s mind with an urgent point, which we might call theme.”
― Donald Maass

“What the novelist is doing, though, is not causing readers to feel as the novelist does, or as his characters do, but rather inducing for each reader a unique emotional journey through a story.”
― Donald Maass, The Emotional Craft of Fiction: How to Write the Story Beneath the Surface

“Dive from a high platform, walk a country lane, watch your computer freeze, cross a finish line, hear your morning alarm, look for a parking space, toast on your anniversary, embrace a friend after a funeral. As you live your life, what do you feel? Terror, serenity, frustration, relief, groaning reluctance, patient endurance, pride, satisfaction, or a grief made bearable because somehow life will go on. We experience life as feelings.”
― Donald Maass, The Emotional Craft of Fiction: How to Write the Story Beneath the Surface

“High-impact 21st century fiction is built on unique voices, uncommon characters, and tales that can only be told by a particular author. They’re sui generis.”
― Donald Maass, Writing 21st Century Fiction: High Impact Techniques for Exceptional Storytelling

“When a plot resolves, readers are satisfied, but what they remember of a novel is what they felt while reading it. Hooks may hook, twists may intrigue, tension may turn pages, and prose may dazzle, but all of those effects fade as quickly as fireworks in a night sky. Ask readers what they best remember about novels and most will say the characters, but is that accurate? It’s true that characters become real to us but that is because of what they cause us to feel. Characters aren’t actually real; only our own feelings are. Emotional”
― Donald Maass, The Emotional Craft of Fiction: How to Write the Story Beneath the Surface

“Here’s a writing craft tool that you can remove from your toolbox and throw away: description. It’s the stuff that most readers skim. Even when deftly done using the five senses it’s a lead weight. It isn’t needed anymore.”
― Donald Maass, Writing 21st Century Fiction: High Impact Techniques for Exceptional Storytelling

“Why is it important to look at fiction writing through the lens of emotional experience? Because that’s the way readers read. They don’t so much read as respond. They do not automatically adopt your outlook and outrage. They formulate their own. You are not the author of what readers feel, just the provocateur of those feelings. You may curate your characters’ experiences and put them on display, but the exhibit’s meaning is different in thousands of ways for thousands of different museum visitors, your readers. Not”
― Donald Maass, The Emotional Craft of Fiction: How to Write the Story Beneath the Surface

“An ironic, snarky, or perky tone can be used to avoid true intimacy with readers. Literary writing isn’t necessarily intimate, either. A life “closely observed” doesn’t mean we’ll care about it.”
― Donald Maass, The Emotional Craft of Fiction: How to Write the Story Beneath the Surface

“When a hot trend turns into a sub-category, new strictures arise along with it. Tropes turn into shortcuts, character paradigms become cardboard cutouts. Publishing pulls the bandwagon, true enough, but when feel-alike fiction floods the market its impact declines because it is starved of what makes fiction rich, surprising, moving, and masterful.”
― Donald Maass, Writing 21st Century Fiction: High Impact Techniques for Exceptional Storytelling

“Let’s talk about me!” Generally speaking, that’s not a great idea for handling yourself in social situations. A better plan is to listen and ask questions. Being interested in others is the way to make friends and influence people. In bonding readers to characters on the page, however, the reverse is true. We open our hearts to those whose hearts are first open to us.”
― Donald Maass

“To infuse a novel with a significance that speaks to many requires, paradoxically, that you ignore what the public wants and focus instead on what matters to you.”
― Donald Maass, Writing 21st Century Fiction: High Impact Techniques for Exceptional Storytelling

“That said, nothing builds reader involvement more surely than a character whose moral struggle pervades the tale. When readers hope, beg, and plead with you to let a character turn toward the light, you have readers where you want them. A character who is good is good; a character whom we want to be good is even better.”
― Donald Maass

“To see how differently folks experience a work of fiction, check their comments on Goodreads. Are those people all reading the same novel?”
― Donald Maass, The Emotional Craft of Fiction: How to Write the Story Beneath the Surface

“Symbols are not only objects; they can be gestures, places, and words. Story can be symbolic all on its own, as in allegory. Considering the power of this oldest of literary devices,”
― Donald Maass, The Emotional Craft of Fiction: How to Write the Story Beneath the Surface

“The fact is that roughly two-thirds of all fiction purchases are made because the consumer is already familiar with the author.”
― Donald Maass, Writing the Breakout Novel: Winning Advice from a Top Agent and His Best-selling Client

“In short, a premise is any single image, moment, feeling, or belief that has enough power and personal meaning for the author to set her story on fire, and propel it like a rocket for hundreds of pages.”
― Donald Maass, The Breakout Novelist: How to Craft Novels That Stand Out and Sell

“The next biggest reason folks buy fiction is that it has been personally recommended to them by a friend, family member or bookstore employee. That process is called word of mouth. Savvy publishers understand its power and try to facilitate its effect with advance reading copies (ARCs), samplers, first chapters circulated by e-mail, Web sites and the like.”
― Donald Maass, Writing the Breakout Novel: Winning Advice from a Top Agent and His Best-selling Client

“The most useful question is not how can I get across what characters are going through? The better question is how can I get readers to go on emotional journeys of their own?”
― Donald Maass, The Emotional Craft of Fiction: How to Write the Story Beneath the Surface

“The arc of moral change isn’t complete when change itself arrives. An insight gained, an understanding reached, the end of inner conflict, or the arrival of inner peace are fine, but there is one more step: proof. When a person has changed, we can see it. A selfish person turns selfless. An inward person looks outward. For authors, it’s a kind of giving back. When inner peace has arrived, it’s time for a transformed character to put good into the world.”
― Donald Maass

“It takes courage to violate expectations, but sometimes the reward is a new level of success.”
― Donald Maass, The Fire in Fiction: Passion, Purpose and Techniques to Make Your Novel Great

“What shapes us and gives our lives meaning are not the things that happen to us, but their significance. Life lessons, revelations, changes, and growing convictions are what we think of when we ponder who we are.”
― Donald Maass

“His characters may be cardboard, but each has a clear, uncomplicated purpose. Every moment of the story contributes to building conflict.”
― Donald Maass, Writing the Breakout Novel: Winning Advice from a Top Agent and His Best-selling Client

“Do it. Go there. Take it away, permanently. Deliver the fear. Force the task. Remove all hope. Demand the sacrifice. Enact defeat. Wreck everything. Great endings are built of great climaxes: enormous feats, worst fears, tremendous losses, harrowing sacrifices, utter destruction.”
― Donald Maass, Writing 21st Century Fiction: High Impact Techniques for Exceptional Storytelling

“A work of fiction grips our imaginations because we care, both about the characters in the tale and about ourselves. To put it another way, we are concerned about the outcome of the story because what is happening to the characters could happen to us.”
― Donald Maass, The Breakout Novelist: How to Craft Novels That Stand Out and Sell

“Plot happens outside but story happens inside. Readers won't get the true story, though, unless you put it on the page--both the big meaning in small events, and the overlooked implications of large plot turns.”
― Donald Maass, The Emotional Craft of Fiction: How to Write the Story Beneath the Surface

“What gets readers going are feelings that are fresh and unexpected. Yet those feelings also need to be real and true; otherwise, they will come across as contrived—they’ll ring false and fail to ignite the reader’s emotions. Skillful authors play against expected feelings. They go down several emotional layers in order to bring up emotions that will catch readers by surprise. There’s always a different emotion to use. A story situation is an emotional elephant. There are many ways of looking at and feeling about what’s happening at any given moment. Stop your story at any point, ask the point-of-view character what she is feeling, and it’s never just one answer. Ask two characters what they feel about what’s happening and neither will ever say the same thing. Human beings are complex. We have emotions on the surface and emotions underneath. There are emotions that we minimize, hide, and deny. There are emotions that embarrass us, reveal too much, and make us vulnerable. Our emotions can be profoundly trivial or so elevated that they’re silly. What we feel is inescapably influenced by our history, morals, loyalties, and politics.”
― Donald Maass, The Emotional Craft of Fiction: How to Write the Story Beneath the Surface