In America, the stories we tell ourselves and we tell each other in fiction have to do with individualism. Every person here is the center of his or her own story. And our job as people and as characters is to find our own motivations and desires, to overcome conflicts and obstacles toward defining ourselves so that we grow and change.

Adam Johnson

Categorized in : Character Jobs Motivation

Orphans are the only ones who get to choose their fathers, and they love them twice as much.

Adam Johnson

orphan father

The next day, she was silent. For breakfast, she murdered an onion and served it raw.

Adam Johnson

onions next-day breakfast

Sometimes in life, things happen that will knock you back. Hell, you may get beaten to your knees but you must never ALLOW this world to knock you down! Conjure up all the strength you have and drive through whatever it is keeping you on your knees. Build up the strength and your knees may never buckle again!

Adam Johnson

adversity overcoming motivational

Writing is hard work, and if anything's true about the process, it's that fact that a good story is hard to find and even trickier to get on paper. What's less romantic than staring alone at a blank screen? And edgy? I've changed the cat little because I didn't know what my characters were going to say next.

Adam Johnson

hard-work writing character

Today, tomorrow," she said. "A day is nothing. A day is just a match you strike after the ten thousand matches before it have gone out.

Adam Johnson

tomorrow gone today

Where we are from... [s]tories are factual. If a farmer is declared a music virtuoso by the state, everyone had better start calling him maestro. And secretly, he'd be wise to start practicing the piano. For us, the story is more important than the person. If a man and his story are in conflict, it is the man who must change.

Adam Johnson

piano wise men

Had she never been hungry enough to eat a flower? Did she not know that you could eat daisies, daylilies, pansies, and marigolds? That hungry enough, a person could consume the bright faces of violas, even the stems of dandelions and the bitter hips of roses?

Adam Johnson

flower rose life

What good's a captive without her captor?

Adam Johnson

captives

All the lessons you need to learn in life, he said, will be taught to you by your enemy.

Adam Johnson

lessons enemy needs

For an entire populace, change, growth, and spontaneity were dangerous. Acting upon a personal desire, whispering a hidden longing, revealing your true feelings - all the human actions we think of as essential to a character - had be censored by the self lest they be punished by the state.

Adam Johnson

self character thinking

A good story feels both surprising and inevitable, fresh and familiar.

Adam Johnson

inevitable familiar stories

But, in North Korea, it's just the opposite. There's one story. It's written by the Kim regime. And 23 million people are conscripted to be secondary characters. There, as a youth, your aptitude towards certain jobs is measured, and the rest of your life is dictated, whether you'll be a fisherman or a farmer or an opera singer.

Adam Johnson

korea jobs character

Imagine a world in which no writer has written a literary novel in sixty years. Imagine a place where not a single person has read a book that is truly about the character at its center.

Adam Johnson

character book years

But people do things to survive, and then after they survive, they can't live with what they've done.

Adam Johnson

done people

The darkness inside your head is something your imagination fills with stories that have nothing to do with the real darkness around you.

Adam Johnson

real imagination darkness

[I]n communism, you'd threaten a dog into compliance, while in capitalism, obedience is obtained through bribes.

Adam Johnson

socialism communism dog

Use your imagination only on the future, never on the present or the past.

Adam Johnson

imagination use past

The light, the sky, the water, they were all things you looked through during the day. At night, they were things you looked into. You looked into the stars, you looked into dark rollers and the surprising platinum flash of their caps.

Adam Johnson

stars dark night

Like putting a name to my problems would solve anything

Adam Johnson

solve problem names

In my experience, ghosts are made up only of the living, people you know are out there but are forever out of range

Adam Johnson

ghost forever people