By author Joe Hill(strom King), whose name can get me to buy any book, on his website: http://joehillfiction.com/?p=1909

"Imaginative writing is fundamentally amateur." - Jonathan Franzen, How To Be Alone

Found it here

M. Harmon, creator and showrunner of a television show I don't watch named Community, offers his thoughts on plotting in this piece, and the article even presents us with this handy example of Harmon's diagram:

• 1.  A character is in a zone of comfort
• 2.  But they want something
• 3.  They enter an unfamiliar situation
• 4.  Adapt to it
• 5.  Get what they wanted
• 6.  Pay a heavy price for it
• 7.  Then return to their familiar situation
• 8.  Having changed

He claims every solid plot in the world reflects his circle. I think I'll spend some time playing with that theory today.

Alan Moore in a recent interview on Newsarama:

"Writing is the most elegant, the most sophisticated, and the most in some ways enigmatic of the arts. Just the very concept, which connects up with ideas of Kabbalah, that you can conjure up the entire universe, the entire conceivable universe, with 10 digits and 22, 26 letters! I mean, the fact that what a writer does is to express his or her thoughts in this kind of brutally simple code – 26 characters, a handful of punctuation.

"With that, he or she can transmit the entire contents of his or her mind into the mind of another individual with whatever kind of surprise packages might be found up in there! You can alter peoples’ consciousness – this is, of course, what all writing is doing, not all necessarily in a good way.

"But, I mean, all of us have watched a dull soap opera when there’s nothing else to do and find ourselves slightly duller at the end of it. You can use writing as a kind of soporific to give people the same stuff they watched yesterday, and in that way keep them asleep, or you can use language to actually expand their consciousness.

"This is not at all fanciful. I think if we agree with George Orwell that a reduced vocabulary will necessarily inspire a reduced consciousness, as in his Newspeak in 1984 where the vocabulary has been reduced to a few thousand words in hope of mentally enslaving the population, who will only be able to speak that language and only have that range of concepts available to them.

"I think if we accept that that is possible – and I think it certainly is, given that the average reader of the tabloid Sun newspaper over here only needs 10,000 words, which believe me, is a pitifully small human vocabulary – if it is true, that by limiting people’s language we limit what they’re capable of thinking of, then the opposite of that must be true as well.

"By expanding the range of words and concepts available to people, by putting those words into new orders, by exploiting the rhythmic properties of words, by using the almost magical capabilities of language to evoke or summon up some entity or mood or atmosphere to take the reader to some completely different imaginary world – most of the things magic claims are repeatable in ordinary prose.

"I believe even Al Crowley himself said, “Actually, a great artist is superior to a great magician.” And I would say that that is true. I would say that in the purest sense, there is no difference between those two things. It just depends on whether you choose to see your craft in those terms or not.

"I feel that because I do see myself in those terms, that has only had an empowering quality. I have gotten an almost religious kind of respect for things that I would previously have taken for granted and not thought about like, say, language itself. My approach to magic, if anything, has made me appreciate how much is already there in ordinary writing, in ordinary language, or in the extraordinary language that someone of the right inclination can bring to the field.

"If you think about it, there are things in books that have caused bloody wars that have completely changed in the civilizations that they have happened to, for better or for worse. The immense power of the word is present everywhere in the world around us.

"Every technology we invent is just that, it is a tech-nology – it is a nology, writing, about some kind of tech. That is what a technology is. And so all technology is predicated on the original technology of language. And I don’t believe there is anything the right kind of language can’t do.

"I remember I was very inspired at the age of 14 or 15 by reading William Burroughs’ statement that a sufficiently convincing writer should be able to write about death so convincingly that any reader would die.

"Now, that is a bit extreme, and not anything I particularly want to do, but I like the general principal that by using mirror neurons – which is something that I have been talking about a bit at a science festival with a neuroscientist and Iain Sinclair – which postulates that if we see someone doing something, part of our brain lights up as though we were doing it ourselves. And I think that that extends to reading about something in a piece of text.

"If I am watching someone on a precarious window ledge in a television drama, the palms of my hand will get very, very sweaty, and I’ll have an uncomfortable tingling sensation in my feet. The same thing will happen if I’m reading a particularly convincing description of someone in a certain condition.

"Words can affect you physiologically. They can change the entire world. It’s just a matter of how seriously you take them, and how ingeniously you apply them."