Preserved Killick, Captain's Steward: [hearing Aubrey and Maturin warming up for their music session] Ugh, here we go again. Scrape, scrape, scrape!
According to one critic, my works looked like scraped billboards. I went to look at the billboards and decided that more billboards should be scraped.
A lie will easily get you out of a scrape, and yet, strangely and beautifully, rapture possesses you when you have taken the scrape and left out the lie.
Characters are the lifeblood of any good book.
Ugly and futile: lean neck and thick hair and a stain of ink, a snail’s bed. Yet someone had loved him, borne him in her arms and in her heart. But for her the race of the world would have trampled him underfoot, a squashed boneless snail. She had ...
By mastering character and plot, you give your book a fighting chance and without character and plot, no book can survive.
Perfection should generally be avoided in a character. Real people, such as your readers, aren’t flawless and chances are they are not going to be able to fully identify with a character who is.
We all have a natural instinct to protect children from harm. It's never fun to see a child hurt, even if it's just a scraped knee. But on the other hand, children need to take on physical challenges to learn and grow, and scraped knees and other bum...
In real life people do occasionally act out of character or do things we wouldn’t normally expect them to do. In fiction, there should be a good reason for a character to do something outside of the ordinary.
I manage to scrape together a private life, despite the press.
I myself scraped seven poor passes at O-level.
There is filth on the floor, and it must be scraped up with the muck-rake.
People who believe in flying saucers are the scrapings from the bottom.
African film makers are scraping by on a mere pittance.
I'll play until they have to scrape me off the stage.
Akismet started on a $70 dollar-a-month server. Anyone can scrape together $70.
I got in trouble with the police, and that was a rude awakening. That was it. I'd seen the bottom of the pit, and it was time to scrape myself out of it.
I was able to support myself by acting alone about six years ago. Until then, I was just scraping by.
You can't make a living as a playwright. You can barely scrape by.
My great crime in the world is blunder I will get into scrapes without intention or any bad motive.
So now I'm left with cigarettes, and I'm trying to scrape that off my shoe and then I'll be done.
