"Style is the writer, and therefore what you are, rather than what you know, will at last determine your style.
Sympathize with the reader's plight but never seek to know the reader's wants. Your whole duty as a writer is to please and satisfy yourself, and the true writer always plays to an audience of one."
-Strunk and White in Elements of Style
I do believe that what we are, not what we know, determine what we write. Because for a story or character to be real, it has to resound in the person writing it. She has to believe in the words she writes, in the truth and worth of what she's written, before anyone else can believe it with her.
A painter in a certain novel once said this: A portrait reveals more about the person painting it than the person sitting for it. We write about characters very different from us in a world far removed from the one we live in. But to make them live, we breathe something of ourselves in them, and then by showing how they live, show something of ourselves as well.
That is why I write.
Kitsilver
More quotes:
Heroism isn't a simple matter of being heroic, of walking around being strong and brave and big-shouldered. Heroism is in the doing and the becoming, in the action and the journey. Our protagonists become heroes by their actions and reactions, manifested in the events of the plot, but most of all, because they go beyond what they are, and risk their identities to become something more.
- "Being, Doing, Becoming: The Heroic Strength, the Heroic Flaw, the Heroic Journey" by Alicia Rasley
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