Rewrite Your Story Quotes

Heinlein's Rules for Writers Rule One: You Must Write Rule Two: Finish What Your Start Rule Three: You Must Refrain From Rewriting, Except to Editorial Order Rule Four: You Must Put Your Story on the Market Rule Five: You Must Keep it on the Market until it has Sold

When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story,” he said. “When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.

If life hands you some crappy chapters. . . then rewrite your story.

There is no list of rules. There is one rule. The rule is: there are no rules. Happiness comes from living as you need to, as you want to. As your inner voice tells you to. Happiness comes from being who you actually are instead of who you think you are supposed to be. Being traditional is not traditional anymore. It’s funny that we still think of it that way. Normalize your lives, people. You don’t want a baby? Don’t have one. I don’t want to get married? I won’t. You want to live alone? Enjoy it. You want to love someone? Love someone. Don’t apologize. Don’t explain. Don’t ever feel less than. When you feel the need to apologize or explain who you are, it means the voice in your head is telling you the wrong story. Wipe the slate clean. And rewrite it. No fairy tales. Be your own narrator. And go for a happy ending. One foot in front of the other. You will make it.

Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open. Your stuff starts out being just for you, in other words, but then it goes out. Once you know what the story is and get it right — as right as you can, anyway — it belongs to anyone who wants to read it. Or criticize it.

I am one man with a laptop. When I give the world my characters, it's because I don't want to keep them for myself. You don't like what I made them do? Fucking tell me I'm wrong! Rewrite the story. Throw in a new plot twist. Make up your own ending.

This afternoon, burn down the house. Tomorrow, pour critical water upon the simmering coals. Time enough to think and cut and rewrite tomorrow. But today-explode-fly-apart-disintegrate! The other six or seven drafts are going to be pure torture. So why not enjoy the first draft, in the hope that your joy will seek and find others in the world who, by reading your story, will catch fire, too?

Share your story with someone. You never know how one sentence of your life story could inspire someone to rewrite their own.

Try to write your own story. Consider writing about yourself, or rewriting something in your life you wished had gone differently. Then, be brave and share with someone what you’ve written. How did this process feel for you?

At the end of the day, your life is just a story. If you don't like the direction it's going, change it. Rewrite it. When you rewrite a sentence, you erase it and start over until you get it right. Yes, it's a little more complicated with a life, but the principle is the same. And remember, don't let anyone ever tell you that your revisions are not the truth.

I know you like to be in control and you operate a lot from fear but you have to break the bounds of your past Nicole and rewrite the story you’ve been telling yourself based off of others experiences. You have to create your own experience, write your own story.

Don’t apologize. Don’t explain. Don’t ever feel less than. When you feel the need to apologize or explain who you are, it means the voice in your head is telling you the wrong story. Wipe the slate clean. And rewrite it.

When you release money blocks and become self-aware about your own personal relationship with money, you can begin to re-write your own personal money story.

When you write a story, you're telling yourself the story. When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.

Becoming psychologically flexible is key to personal transformation, not overattaching to your current identity or perspectives. Becoming insatiably committed to a future purpose and embracing emotions rather than avoiding them is how radical change occurs.

All the experiences in your life- from single conversations to your broader culture- shape the microscopic details of your brain. Neurally speaking, who you are depends on where you've been. Your brain is a relentless shape-shifter, constantly rewriting its own circuitry- and because your experiences are unique, so are the vast detailed patterns in your neural networks. Because they continue to change your whole life, your identity is a moving target; it never reaches an endpoint.

We all spend our lives kicking the crap out of ourselves for not being this way or that way, not having this thing or that thing, not being like this person or that person. For not living up to some standard we think applies across the board to all of us. We all spend our lives trying to follow the same path, live by the same rules. I think we believe that happiness lies in following the same list of rules. In being more like everyone else. That? Is wrong. There is no list of rules. There is one rule. The rule is: there are no rules. Happiness comes from living as you need to, as you want to. As your inner voice tells you to. Happiness comes from being who you actually are instead of who you think you are supposed to be. Being traditional is not traditional anymore. It’s funny that we still think of it that way. Normalize your lives, people. You don’t want a baby? Don’t have one. I don’t want to get married? I won’t. You want to live alone? Enjoy it. You want to love someone? Love someone. Don’t apologize. Don’t explain. Don’t ever feel less than. When you feel the need to apologize or explain who you are, it means the voice in your head is telling you the wrong story. Wipe the slate clean. And rewrite it. No fairy tales. Be your own narrator. And go for a happy ending. One foot in front of the other. You will make it.

But it is difficult to rewrite the story of your life, especially when you have been telling it one way for so long.

Sometimes when you’re grieving you don’t want to be told things will get better. You just want to feel the pain without people making false promises. With death nothing gets better. They’re still gone. Things just get more tolerable to deal with.

You are not a single and narrow “type” of person. In different situations and around different people, you are different. Your personality is dynamic, flexible, and contextual. Moreover, your personality changes throughout your life, far more than you can presently imagine.

A mistake repeated more than once is a decision. —Paulo Coelho

Our beliefs are merely stories in our minds that we ourselves wrote long ago. Knowing that, don’t you feel empowered to rewrite them if they no longer serve you? Scan your mind for viruses called fears, anxieties, judgments, doubts, hatred and despair, and put a little note next to them that says “Outdated; no longer valid.” I’ve learned so much from my mistakes, I think I’m gonna go out there and make some more! —Anonymous

Knowing our personal financial identity allows for healing, empathy, and further strengthening of relationships when we apply it in the context of family or other relationships with friends, a spouse, and co-workers. It is also a very helpful framework for healing our money mindset and money blocks (including ancestral money blocks), so we can re-write our own personal money stories, that are rooted in our own personal financial identity.

You don’t propose marriage after one date. You don’t decide on a career after one article or class session. You don’t cast your vote based on one opinion of the candidate in question. Stories, essays, novels, and memoirs all deserve to be, indeed have to be read multiple times. Every writer worth his or her salt knows that writing is rewriting. Every reader should know the same thing about understanding text: that is, real reading is rereading.

Until you stop skim-reading your friend or lover or family member, and instead read them more closely, as a never-ending story. A story whose plot you cannot control, or rewrite, or ever fully finish.

Well, the good news is it's never too late to rewrite your own story,' he said. 'If you feel like something is wrong, there's always a chance to make things right, no matter who's to blame. But you should never feel responsible for other people's choices. That's too big a burden for anyone to carry.

[E]verything is fiction. When you tell yourself the story of your life, the story of your day, you edit and rewrite and weave a narrative out of a collection of random experiences and events. Your conversations are fiction. Your friends and loved ones—they are characters you have created. And your arguments with them are like meetings with an editor—please, they beseech you, you beseech them, rewrite me. You have a perception of the way things are, and you impose it on your memory, and in this way you think, in the same way that I think, that you are living something that is describable. When of course, what we actually live, what we actually experience—with our senses and our nerves—is a vast, absurd, beautiful, ridiculous chaos.

When you write a story, you are telling yourself the story. When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are NOT the story...Your stuff starts out being just for you...but then it goes out. Once you know what the story is and get it right, as right as you can...it belongs to anyone who wants to read it, or criticise it.

If I’m being honest, Goldie, I’ve always loved the beautiful words you write, but I might like how your body speaks to me even more.

When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story,” he said. “When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.” Gould

Few people intentionally define and shape their identity, based on who they plan to be, and then become that person.

At the end of the day, your life is just a story. If you don’t like the direction it’s going, change it. Rewrite it. When you rewrite a sentence, you erase it and start over until you get it right. Yes, it’s a little more complicated with a life, but the principle is the same. And remember, don’t let anyone ever tell you that your revisions are not the truth.

You are the author of your own life story. You have the leading role and get to determine how you interact with your supporting cast and other characters. Without realizing it, you may have allowed the events in your life to write your story for you rather than taking deliberate action to write it in your own voice. What will it take to love your life story to create the happy endings you desire?

You alone own your story. Do not let another tell it, and if you find yourself in the company of one determined to rewrite your words or own your narrative, fight like hell until you hold it again. There is little in life that is solely ours. Your story is one of those priceless few things. It is beyond precious. The people meant to be In your life will only strengthen your voice, not take it from you.

Humans have the ability to rewrite history. Within a few decades it is not even questioned. Stories of the past become as real as the world you walk through today. Wars are waged over false history. Sins are denied. All for mankind to move forward and feel comfortable about its past. Your true history is written in the stars. Look up, breathe in, and be humbled by the ones who came before you. The ones who have suffered, who have endured, who have overcome. Their blood is alive in you. Their spirits roam freely in the heavens above.

Clive Barker, Stephen King, Angela Carter, and Anne Rice. King's Cujo, the story of a rabid St. Bernard that traps a mother and her dying son in a car, and Rice's Interview with the Vampire, the wildly popular tale of a modern-day Dracula, epitomize the genre.

You know exactly what this house is. What this spot is,” he says, raising his voice. He points behind him. “We spent summer nights under the stars going over your favorite floor plans, what you wanted in a house. Right here. At this spot. You can’t tell me you forgot that.

Let God begin to rewrite your story. Invite him to show you your past through his eyes. Ask him to surface good memories you have forgotten. He would love to do it. There is healing to be had there. There is a replacing of regret with mercy. Though our past has shaped us, we are not our past. Though our failures and sin have had an effect on who we are, we are not defined by our failures or our sin. Though thought patterns and addictions have overwhelmed us, we are not overcome by them and we will never be overcome by them. Jesus has won our victory. Jesus is our victory.

When telling the story of your life, it is of great value to recognize and focus on the details that reveal or inspire an empowered unfolding of your being. Much like rewriting your own DNA, every aspect of your life and growth will emanate from the building blocks of your history—however you choose to tell it. This is not to suggest that you should deny or bury your mistakes, traumas or misfortunes, but rather, recognize and reveal them within an empowered context of a bigger picture.

Endurance races are a microcosm of life; you're high, you're low, in the race, out of the race, crushing it, getting crushed, managing fears, rewriting stories.

I’m yours.” One thrust. “I love you.” Another thrust. “I won’t survive if I lose you again.

For my entire life, my heart has only beat for one person. That’s you, Cade Jennings. Even without knowing if you’d ever be mine, I knew I was yours.

...in a healthy relationship, both people can be strong.

all you have to do is let go of your present story and rewrite a new one that fits who you truly are.

Spread those legs open and wide for me, baby. It’s time for me to show you how much better my tongue is compared to your fingers.

I haven’t fallen in love with anyone since you left. I’m not able to. You can’t fall in love with someone if your heart still belongs to someone else.

Personality is not stable but changes regardless of whether you’re purposeful about that change or not.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. said, “A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.

People use the past as the excuse to remain stuck in habits and attitudes that keep them from growing.

When you write a story, you're telling yourself the story...when you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.

Even on a tight deadline, it is often possible to write, reflect and write again. Don’t stop rewriting until your deadline makes you stop.

When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story,’ he said. ‘When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.

Without a meaningful goal, attempting changes lacks meaning, requires unsustainable willpower, and ultimately leads to failure.

How do you forgive? You choose to release it, you pray for your enemy, and, I think probably most importantly, you recognize that God is standing with you—and he will have the final word.

I do.” “Ask me again if I’m yours.” “Are you mine?” “My heart only beats like that for you.” I press her hand against my chest, proving to her that no one controls my heartbeats like she does.

Look at you being such a good fucking girl, coating my cock in your cum. You’re doing so fucking good at making sure my cock is nice and wet, making it easier to slide into your perfect pussy.

Why do you care if I’m lying or telling the truth? It shouldn’t matter. I shouldn’t matter to you.” “Some days I’m fucking terrified because it feels like you’re the only thing that really matters.

You are powerful beyond measure! Sometimes we are too afraid of what we might become so we hold on to the story we sold ourselves. You were born chosen and blessed. When you move away from stress and worry, you can begin to cultivate the greatness within. You've gotten glimpses of what you can be because of the hand of God on your life. Let's move from sickness to success. Rewrite your story and you win!!!!

Purpose trumps personality. Without a deep sense of purpose, your personality will be based on avoiding pain and pursuing pleasure, which is an animalistic and low-level mode of operating. This is the common view and approach to personality for most. However, when you’re driven by purpose, you’ll be highly flexible and you’ll make decisions irrespective of pain and pleasure to create and become what you want.

When someone proactively labels themselves an "introvert" or even an "extrovert," they've officially made themself "dumber"--unless for some reason one of those labels will enable them to achieve a particular goal.

When I give the world my characters, it’s because I don’t want to keep them for myself. You don’t like what I made them do? Fucking tell me I’m wrong! Rewrite the story. Throw in a new plot twist. Make up your own ending.

Your pinkies would be touching across the pillows, and I could tell that no matter the fact you had just lost a mother and your father was distant, that you were going to be okay. Because of my baby boy, you were going to be okay.

I realized that our only real goal in any of our marketing is to identify the false beliefs and false stories our customers are telling themselves—the ones that are keeping them from success—and to rewrite these stories inside their minds.

The history of each story, then, should read almost like a weather report: Hot today, cool tomorrow. This afternoon, burn down the house. Tomorrow, pour cold critical water upon the simmering coals. Time enough to think and cut and rewrite tomorrow. But today—explode—fly apart—disintegrate! The other six or seven drafts are going to be pure torture. So why not enjoy the first draft, in the hope that your joy will seek and find others in the world who, reading your story, will catch fire, too?

You don’t stop loving someone even after they break your heart. You can’t stop loving them, no matter what damage was done. I can only hope the same can be said for her. I know I broke her heart, I’m ready to plead with her and hope I kept her love.

it’s never too late to rewrite your own story,” he said. “If you feel like something is wrong, there’s always a chance to make things right, no matter who’s to blame. But you should never feel responsible for other people’s choices. That’s too big a burden for anyone to carry.

Life is the story you tell yourself. But how you tell that story—are you a hero, victim, lover, warrior, caretaker, believer—matters a great deal. How you adapt that story—how you revise, rethink, and rewrite your personal narrative as things change, lurch, or go wrong in your life—matters even more.

I’m a child? I am?” Luke laughs sharply, and Varya recoils. “You’re the one trying to convince yourself the world is rational, like there’s anything you can do to put a dent in death. You’re telling yourself that they died because of x, and you lived because of y, and that those things are mutually exclusive. That way you can believe you’re smarter; that way you can believe you’re different. But you’re just as irrational as the rest of them. You call yourself a scientist, you use words like longevity and healthful aging, but you know the most basic story of existence—everything that lives must die—and you want to rewrite it.

I know this is long but I have a small request for you, Marigold. I know Cade held you together all those years—and he may not know it—but you were holding him together too. I ask that maybe this one last time, you help hold him together. Please believe him when he tells you he loves you. Please look in your heart… because maybe you still love him too.

What currently prevents your dreams from becoming reality is buried trauma keeping you trapped in your past, shutting down your confidence and imagination. Sure, trauma occurs as major, life-altering events. But more often, “trauma” is planted in minor incidents and conversations that limit your view of who you are and what you can do, creating a fixed mindset.

Our lives today are the culmination of every thought we’ve ever had. Once we embrace this concept—once we recognize we have created our world and take responsibility for it—we also realize we have the power to change our world by simply changing our thoughts. We can rewrite our story through new experiences and different responses, and enjoy a renewal of our inner lives.

One aspect of soulful healing that is most challenging and therefore most fruitful is the need to release a part of your story that may be lying underneath and behind the illness. Healing requires a willingness to rewrite the story you tell yourself about what has happened in your life and why it’s happened. There is often an emotional attachment to the pattern that doesn’t allow for easy change.

Labels can serve goals, but goals should never serve labels. When a goal serves a label, you've made the label your ultimate reality, and you've created a life to prove or support that label. You see this when someone says, "I'm pursuing this because I'm an extrovert." This form of goal-setting occurs when you base your goals on your current persona rather than setting goals that expand upon and change who you are.

write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open. Your stuff starts out being just for you, in other words, but then it goes out. Once you know what the story is and get it right—as right as you can, anyway—it belongs to anyone who wants to read it. Or criticize it. If you’re very lucky (this is my idea, not John Gould’s, but I believe he would have subscribed to the notion), more will want to do the former than the latter.

You're telling yourself that they died because of x, and you lived because of y, and that those things are mutually exclusive. That way you can believe you're smarter; that way you can believe you're different. But you're just as irrational as the rest of them. You call yourself a scientist, you use words like longevity and healthful aging, but you know the most basic story of existence- everything that lives must die- and you want to rewrite it.

All the experiences in your life – from single conversations to your broader culture – shape the microscopic details of your brain. Neurally speaking, who you are depends on where you’ve been. Your brain is a relentless shape-shifter, constantly rewriting its own circuitry – and because your experiences are unique, so are the vast, detailed patterns in your neural networks. Because they continue to change your whole life, your identity is a moving target; it never reaches an endpoint.

I read a wonderful passage in an interview with Carolyn Chute, the author of The Beans of Egypt, Maine, who was discussing rewriting: “I feel like a lot of time my writing is like having about twenty boxes of Christmas decorations. But no tree. You’re going, Where do I put this? Then they go, Okay, you can have a tree, but we’ll blindfold you and you gotta cut it down with a spoon.” This is how I’ve arrived at my plots a number of times. I would have all these wonderful shiny bulbs, each self-contained with nothing to hang them on. But I would stay with the characters, caring for them, getting to know them better and better, suiting up each morning and working as hard as I could, and somehow, mysteriously, I would come to know what their story was. Over and over I feel as if my characters know who they are, and what happens to them, and where they have been and where they will go, and what they are capable of doing, but they need me to write it down for them because their handwriting is so bad. Some

It means neither one of us can hide the fact that we know every single fucking thing there is to know about the other person. Time, miles, nothing will change that I know you, Goldie. I know you almost better than I know myself. And I know for a fucking fact that you’re lying.” “How?” “Because I know how much it fucking hurts my soul to see another man look at you the way I look at you. To see him touch you the way I want to touch you. And I know that after every fucking thing between us, even after you leaving me, that you feel the same.

Nine years ago you made a wish, and I desperately wanted to know what you’d wished for. I wanted it to be for me—for us. I want to spend every birthday with you, be your every birthday wish, Goldie. Because you’ll always be mine. I want to be your forever. There isn’t a version of my future that doesn’t have you in it.” He taps his chest, hitting against his heart. “You’re my entire heart. My entire world. I love you so much that it feels like I live and breathe you. Marry me, Goldie? Make me the luckiest man in the world and become my wife?

When a child estranges herself from you (there’s that word Eleanor tries not to employ when speaking of her situation, but it applies) you can allow it to crush you. Or you rebuild your world—smaller maybe, less ambitious, imperfect, with space for sorrow, but also occasional joy. Maybe you see your child only once a year. Maybe never. Maybe she doesn’t want you to see your grandchildren. She may rewrite the history of her childhood, casting you as the source of her greatest trauma. She gets to have her story. But nobody can take away yours—that you loved her, you tried your best. The door remains open.

DW: Some critics have written that they don’t admire your so-called simple style. You have contended that your writing is a result of much rewriting and much revision and is deliberate. CP: The style is simplicity for the sake of complexity. Whoever feels that it is a “simple style” has to look into it and find the right way. Of course the style has become over the years much more complex and much more simple. Two fundamental things about the novel continue to intrigue me and I think this is our gift to ourselves as far as this form is concerned. One is the handling of character, people. No other form can handle people in significant depth over long periods of time. No other form can move back and forth, in and out, nothing can move the way the novel can in terms of the dimension of time. People and time are what I think the novel is really all about and I think they are limitless.

EVERYDAY MAINTENANCE OF THE SOUL What does it mean to care for your soul? Care of the soul is the constant practice of bringing loving attention to the problems, conflicts, and longings of our lives. Emotional suffering is something to be attended to, not split off from. We can learn to read our life as a story, rather than as a clinical case. Moreover, if the story we have been telling ourselves is a melodrama or tragedy, we need to rewrite the story. Every human life, when seen from the perspective of the unrelenting Divine Mercy, is the story of grace unfolding. Love is revealing itself in the precise details of each human life, if only we do not impose the script of self-pity, bitterness, and fearfulness. The soul is where the divine attributes of God may be awakened from their latent state to be integrated into our character. These qualities are the soul's natural inheritance from the Divine. It is through communion with the Divine that the soul takes on the spiritual attributes of kindness, generosity, courage, forgiveness, patience, and freedom.

Our conversation went a little like this: “God, if I lay down my need for those who hurt me to be punished, it doesn’t mean that what they did is okay, right?” “Right.” “So, just to be clear, we are in agreement that what they did is wrong, correct?” “Kim, what they did was wrong. I’m sorry you were hurt.” “When I surrender this to You and release those who hurt me, You know for sure that I’m not saying that I agree with them, right?” “Do you trust Me?” “I trust You, God, but do I still get to be strong? Does surrendering and letting go mean that I’m weak?” “Are you relying on your strength or Mine? You are strong when you trust in Me and rely on My strength.” Ugh. And just like that, God broke through another layer of my old need to protect myself through control. It felt so important to me to be strong. My entire childhood I had to be strong for my mom and siblings. I had to be strong to be brave and defend myself. I had to be strong so fear would not cripple me. And it seemed to me that to trust in God, to surrender, to depend on His strength, to forgive those who hurt me, and to not demand punishment meant I could no longer be strong. I hated that! As I was pondering why this upset me so much, another lie was exposed—the lingering belief that no one can take care of me like I can. Part of me still thought I couldn’t really trust God with my heart and emotions.

Astonishment: these women’s military professions—medical assistant, sniper, machine gunner, commander of an antiaircraft gun, sapper—and now they are accountants, lab technicians, museum guides, teachers…Discrepancy of the roles—here and there. Their memories are as if not about themselves, but some other girls. Now they are surprised at themselves. Before my eyes history “humanizes” itself, becomes like ordinary life. Acquires a different lighting. I’ve happened upon extraordinary storytellers. There are pages in their lives that can rival the best pages of the classics. The person sees herself so clearly from above—from heaven, and from below—from the ground. Before her is the whole path—up and down—from angel to beast. Remembering is not a passionate or dispassionate retelling of a reality that is no more, but a new birth of the past, when time goes in reverse. Above all it is creativity. As they narrate, people create, they “write” their life. Sometimes they also “write up” or “rewrite.” Here you have to be vigilant. On your guard. At the same time pain melts and destroys any falsehood. The temperature is too high! Simple people—nurses, cooks, laundresses—behave more sincerely, I became convinced of that…They, how shall I put it exactly, draw the words out of themselves and not from newspapers and books they have read—not from others. But only from their own sufferings and experiences. The feelings and language of educated people, strange as it may be, are often more subject to the working of time. Its general encrypting. They are infected by secondary knowledge. By myths. Often I have to go for a long time, by various roundabout ways, in order to hear a story of a “woman’s,” not a “man’s” war: not about how we retreated, how we advanced, at which sector of the front…It takes not one meeting, but many sessions. Like a persistent portrait painter. I sit for a long time, sometimes a whole day, in an unknown house or apartment. We drink tea, try on the recently bought blouses, discuss hairstyles and recipes. Look at photos of the grandchildren together. And then…After a certain time, you never know when or why, suddenly comes this long-awaited moment, when the person departs from the canon—plaster and reinforced concrete, like our monuments—and goes on to herself. Into herself. Begins to remember not the war but her youth. A piece of her life…I must seize that moment. Not miss it! But often, after a long day, filled with words, facts, tears, only one phrase remains in my memory (but what a phrase!): “I was so young when I left for the front, I even grew during the war.” I keep it in my notebook, although I have dozens of yards of tape in my tape recorder. Four or five cassettes… What helps me? That we are used to living together. Communally. We are communal people. With us everything is in common—both happiness and tears. We know how to suffer and how to tell about our suffering. Suffering justifies our hard and ungainly life.

Control Find the genetic code for control and rewrite it. Act your way to new thinking. Short, early conversations make efficient work. Use “I intend to . . .” to turn passive followers into active leaders. Resist the urge to provide solutions. Eliminate top-down monitoring systems. Think out loud (both superiors and subordinates). Embrace the inspectors. Competence Take deliberate action. We learn (everywhere, all the time). Don’t brief, certify. Continually and consistently repeat the message. Specify goals, not methods. Clarity Achieve excellence, don’t just avoid errors. Build trust and take care of your people. Use your legacy for inspiration. Use guiding principles for decision criteria. Use immediate recognition to reinforce desired behaviors. Begin with the end in mind. Encourage a questioning attitude over blind obedience.

There are people like Larry Cahill who call us ‘sex difference deniers,’ but it’s the same kind of attack that gets put on feminism at each stage, or whatever wave you think you’re in,

Kill the hesitation, Grab the opportunity, Be a Player not an audience. You have all rights to rewrite your own destiny.

Fear is a question, really. What are you afraid of, and why? There's a history to every horror. Fear is a training master whom you run from or you face. Defining your backstory is the prelude to the story. That's how you solve fear. You rewrite it.

It's troubling at first to realize that our life events in the order they happened will never make good fiction. That's what many people who attend my writing workshops want to turn into a book—“ this happened to me, and then this happened, and then this, and it was unbelievable!” While those experiences won't make good fiction in their given state, the good news is that you still have the right stuff to craft a compelling story. It's what you've learned from your life events and what you want more than anything that drive the plot, not the events themselves.

He broke plot structure into three acts, coinciding with the audience need for intermission. The first act includes the story setup, popularly referred to as the “inciting incident.” The stakes continue to rise in the second act and include a false victory, that point where you think the story is over but it turns out it's not. The false victory is referred to as a major reversal because the trajectory of the story reverses. The climax comes in the third act, followed by the denouement, a French word meaning “to untie,” which perfectly describes the cleaning up of any loose ends that happens at the end of a narrative.

As Baca tells it, that's our job as writers, to strip away the artifice and expectations of life and talk to the world in the dark. Honestly. Authentically. With vulnerability and fear and hope. This is nowhere more important than when you're crafting the people who will populate your novel. The motivations and desires of your characters drive your story and are the engine of your personal transformation. Crafting believable and compelling fictional characters turbo boosts real-life empathy and strengthens social skills as well as coping mechanisms because it guides the writer to consider other people's motives and desires, the consequences of choice and of action, and the complexity of life.

Literary or mainstream fiction: a story in which the protagonist wants to better understand a universal human truth or their place in the world. Romance: a story in which the main character wants love. Western: a story set in the Old West and in which the main character wants things to be fair, and black and white. Horror: a story in which the main character wants to over-come fear and survive. Science fiction: a story in which the main character wants to better understand a universal human truth or their place in the world, plus often find an escape, set in the future. Fantasy: a story in which the main character needs an object and an adventure (whether they know it or not), set in a fantasy world. Mystery (including all its subgenres, such as thrillers and private eye novels): a story in which the main character wants justice. Young adult: a story in which the main character is twelve to eighteen years old and wants at least one of the above (the same applies to middle grade, except the main character is eight to twelve years old).

The rewrite of your story in Christ will permeate every part of your identity and every relationship—with God, yourself, others, and the world. To give your life over for His life means you give up control of how those relationships go.

Laura Lippman's What the Dead Know is inspired by the real-life, unsolved mystery of twin sisters Sheila and Kate Lyon. Lippman first heard the story when she was sixteen years old. Never able to shake it, she fictionalized the tale thirty years later.

to cultivate compassion and wisdom by considering other people's motivations, and provides us practice in controlling attention, emotion, and outcome. We heal when we transmute the chaos of life into the structure of a novel, when we learn to walk through the world as observers and students rather than wounded, when we make choices about what parts of a story are important and what we can let go of.

The Things They Carried has sold over two million copies internationally, won numerous awards, and is an English classroom staple. Isabel Allende was the first writer to hold me inside a sentence, rapt and wondrous. It's no surprise that her most transformative writing springs from personal anguish. Her first book, The House of the Spirits, began as a letter to her dying grandfather whom she could not reach in time. Eva Luna, one of my favorite novels, is about an orphan girl who uses her storytelling gift to survive and thrive amid trauma, and Allende refers to the healing power of writing in many of her interviews. Allende's books have sold over fifty-six million copies, been translated into thirty languages, and been made into successful plays and movies. Such is the power of mining your deep. Jeanette Winterson acknowledges that her novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is her own story of growing up gay in a fundamentalist Christian household in the 1950s. She wrote it to create psychic space from the trauma. In her memoir, she writes of Oranges, “I wrote a story I could live with. The other one was too painful. I could not survive it.” Sherman Alexie, who grew up in poverty on an Indian reservation that as a child he never dreamed he could leave, does something similar in his young adult novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian, named one of the “Best Books of 2007” by School Library Journal. He has said that fictionalizing life is so satisfying because he can spin the story better than real life did. Nora Ephron's roman à clef Heartburn is a sharply funny, fictionalized account of Ephron's own marriage to Carl Bernstein. She couldn't control his cheating during her pregnancy or the subsequent dissolution of their marriage, but through the novelization of her experience, she got to revise the ending of that particular story. In Heartburn, Rachel, the character based on Ephron, is asked

Neurally speaking, who you are depends on where you’ve been. Your brain is a relentless shape-shifter, constantly rewriting its own circuitry – and because your experiences are unique, so are the vast, detailed patterns in your neural networks. Because they continue to change your whole life, your identity is a moving target; it never reaches an endpoint.

There’s always a choice and that choice begins with words—the stories people tell you and the stories you tell yourself. How you choose to build the foundation of your life will determine how well it stands up against the naysayers who try to trip you up.

When your story is ready for rewrite, cut it to the bone. Get rid of every ounce of excess fat. This is going to hurt; revising a story down to the bare essentials is always a little like murdering children, but it must be done.

Open your eyes. See the sunrise. It is there to remind you that you still have another chance to rewrite the story of your life.