“Find a few good characters and see where they take you. The story comes out of who they are and what they want, and the problems they have to overcome to get it. It isn’t just a bunch of stuff that happens to them.”
–“Macy Minnot” in Paul J. McAuley’s Gardens of the Sun
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(It took me years to figure this out; I wasted a godawful amount of time trying to come up with a plot for Free Radicals before I turned my characters loose; they accomplished the task in a few months. –ZT)
Sharp and Pointed 