Long gone are the days where authors could just write and let everything else take care of itself. Jodi Picoult explains: "Nobody can sit in their ivory tower anymore and just write books and expect them to find their way to the masses. Doesn't work that way." "There's a lot of chaff out there. And if you've got wheat, you gotta make sure people know you got wheat."

"The character can carry the entire novel." Dean Koontz binged 34 John D. MacDonald books in 38 days fresh out of college. This is what he learned: "He'd wanna tell you about this character, so he'd just stop. And he'd write three to five pages about this character." "The first time I hit this, I went, 'what is this? I wanna read the rest of the story.' And then by the time I got to the end of page five of the character stuff when the story started again, I actually was saying, 'No! I wanna know more about this character.'" "Kurt Vonnegut actually said about John D. MacDonald, if thousands of years from now, some alien race came to Earth, and they stumbled across the work of John D. MacDonald buried under the ruin of a house, it would be the greatest finding they could ever make to understand how the human race works."