More notes from the blue notebook:  

I just came across some quotes from Gotham Writer's Workshop:

• "The fiction writer takes a fragment of reality and examines it from several angles until it starts to make some damn sense."
• "If you want to be a great writer and you have a choice between being brilliant and lazy, or being clueless but motivated, choose the latter."
• "Figure out why you like what you like, then try to utilize some of the techniques that will help you get there."
• "Plot makes fiction coherent by drawing together all teh characters, settings, voice, and everything else around a single, organizing force."
• "Works of fiction are not, and cannot be, about a million things -- they are usually about just one thing. And that thing, the force that draws everything together in a successful piece of fiction, is a single, pressing question.
  

So, you see, some of my noes are more interesting than others. I especially liked #2, and I don't know why I wrote #4 down at all...