Meredith > Recent Status Updates

I'm in love with this book so far. Dana is a really complex character who feels like a real person trying to survive through something unimaginable. I have to force myself to stop reading so I can sleep.

According to Gardner, third-person omniscient POV is clearly the superior and only correct POV to use in your writing. I'm going to disagree and say that this need to dictate the "one true way" to beginning writers is growing tiresome.

This is an interesting read so far. Certainly has some helpful advice and clearly articulates a lot of the struggles a beginning writer deals with. It is incredibly elitist and pretentious most of the time, however, which is difficult to get past. It's still sort of a mixed bag for me, but the further I read, the more I find it helpful rather than irritating.

"Obviously somebody had been appallingly incompetent and he hoped to God it wasn't him."

"We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we wouldn't fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them."

"We both have war inside of us. Sometimes it keeps us alive. Sometimes it threatens to destroy us."

"Sometimes I forget that I can hurt you. That you are capable of being hurt."

"There is power in controlling something that can do so much damage--in controlling something, period."

"He was trying to adapt to this new state that neither of them really understood. He'd given up trying to persuade her back to him; no matter what he'd done, he'd failed. So maybe he wouldn't try anything anymore. But maybe, too, he now thought he had permission to go farther without her."

"All this time I thought I was playing myself, both the player and the pawn, and yet I have never been more powerless, never more of a piece in someone else's game."

"All this time I thought I was playing myself, both the player and the pawn, and yet I have never been more powerless, never more of a piece in someone else's game."

"I am like a girl under a spell in an enchanted castle and he is the knight who comes to rescue me, and now I find that this is a most uncomfortable position to be in--utterly powerless and unable even to complain.