Do all you can to make your dreams come true.

Every creative person, and I think probably every other person, faces resistance when they are trying to create something good...The harder the resistance, the more important the task must be.

If I learned anything from thinking about my father, it's that there is a force in the world that doesn't want us to live good stories. It doesn't want us to face our issues, to face our fear and bring something beautiful into the world. I guess what I am saying is, I believe God wants us to create beautiful stories, and whatever it is that isn't God wants us to create meaningless stories, teaching the people around us that life just isn't worth living.

A story is a character who wants something and overcomes conflict to get it.

Most of us struggle with the opposite. We don't bring up the negative stakes enough and so the story we're telling falls flat. Remember, if there are no stakes, there is no story.

If we begin our day believing life is supposed to be easy, we will certainly have a terrible day. Life is not easy, nor was it ever supposed to be.

Once an ambition has been decided, a positive turn is an event that moves the protagonist closer to the ambition, and a negative turn moves the protagonist away from his ambition.

A story starts with a hero who wants something. And then the question becomes: Will the hero get what she wants?

The idea is that you place a gap between a character and what they want.

It's the crossing of that distance that makes the story work.

A story doesn't really pick up until the hero needs to disarm a bomb, win someone's heart, defeat a villain, or fight for their emotional or physical survival.

The only two motivations a hero has in a story are to escape something bad or experience something good.