"This book is a set of tools: literary crowbars, chisels, mallets, pliers, tongs, sieves, and drills. Use them to pry, chip, beat, wrench, yank, sift, or punch good characters out of the place where they already live: your memory, your imagination, your soul," p. 2.

"A character who is familiar and unsurprising seems comfortable, believable—but not particularly interesting. A character who is unfamiliar and strange is at once attractive and repulsive, making the reader a little curious and a little afraid. We may be drawn into the story, curious to learn more, yet we will also feel a tingle of suspense ... the uncertainty of not knowing what this person will do, not knowing if we're in danger or not," p. 8.

"The moment you use a technique that doesn't belong in your story, solely for the sake of appealing to some imagined reader who wants a bit more...