Ooh, death, nuts, and what I like to put in my mouth...How long till I'm LKH?

Never? Does never work for you?

Say you're sitting high atop Writers' Mountain, being the guru. Students of writing toil up the hillside, to ask you for the One True Pearl of Wisdom that will shine the glow of enlightment on their labours.

One line, and one line only. Distill, please. What would you tell them?

Since Amy beat me to "write what you want to read," I'll say, "Create good characters--particularly an engaging, intriguing, and believable protagonist or two--and the readers will come."

At least this reader would.

And brownies and chocolate chip cookies shouldn't be mucked up with nuts. Nuts have their proper times and places, but not there.

Susan, as you know, I'm a humongous fan of characters with voices.

But you don't think there needs to be a road for them to travel? Would a corollary be in order?

It's all about the journey?

Oh, definitely, but you said, "one line." And caught me on a week where I've been reading contest entry after contest entry with oodles of plot, but wooden, lifeless characters composed of stereotypes straight out of Romance Central Casting.

So maybe I'd amend it to, "Before you worry about the journey, make sure the travelers are worthy of your readers' attention."

"Everyone has a story. It's up to you to find it."

I think this is where erika's one-liner fits in -- if you've got a compelling character, finding the story he or she needs to tell, or journey to take, is the important thing.

But I also believe that most characters become interesting if they're on the right journey, so there's that, too.

Heh. Yep - I'm doing a sort of cross-stitching of how writers take on their inspiration.

I mean, I'm getting fascinated by the wide range of answers, that really aren't that wide-ranging at all. For me, it's really dead simple: I'm pure Lewis Carroll. Start at the beginning and go on until you reach the end. I am all about the "Once upon a time..."

So it fascinates me to get the quickie distillations, and to try and parse them. Like Susan, I'm fierce about characters the reader will care about, but I've never in my life created a character and then created a journey for them. Mine tend to happen simultaneously.

I've never in my life created a character and then created a journey for them

Pretty much it's look at the road, see who's walking it.

Pretty much it's look at the road, see who's walking it.

And don't be afraid of the curves.

Nic asked me to post his. His is a one-word distillation: "Listen."

I've never in my life created a character and then created a journey for them

I have. Or, kind of. Writing romance, for me, involves following some of the rules. So usually, actually, I do it backwards. In other words, What if two people who never thought they'd see each other again find themselves trapped at a house party together for a weekend? And then I try to figure out who those people are, why they never thought they'd see each other again, and what happens now that they have.

With romance, at least, there are always those genre conventions hanging over you -- there has to be a solvable conflict, hero and heroine each have to have an internal conflict, too, there has to be a happy ending, hero and heroine can't cheat on other, et cetera. Again, just for me, it puts on a leash on how I come up with my plots and characters.