Literary Birthday – 8 September – Ansen Dibell

Ansen Dibell was born on 8 September 1942 and died on 7 March 2006.

Ansen Dibell Quotes

1. There are ways to create, fix, steer and discover plots–ways which, over a writing life, you’d eventually puzzle out for yourself. They aren’t laws. They’re an array of choices, things to try, once you’ve put a name to the particular problem you’re facing now.
2. In Lord of the Flies, Simon’s journey up the mountain to see what’s really up there, monster or not, is a set-piece, as is his return into the middle of the hysterical tribal dance by which the boys are trying to drive out fear. Simon is mistaken for the Beast and killed. We could see it coming, even though Simon didn’t. We weren’t sure—we hoped for the best, but suspected the worst. Seeing a scene like that coming, watching it build to crisis, is one of the major ways of creating tension, drama, and suspense in a story.
3. J. R. R. Tolkien has confessed that about a third of the way through The Fellowship of the Ring, some ruffian named Strider confronted the hobbits in an inn, and Tolkien was in despair. He didn’t know who Strider was, where the book was going, or what to write next. Strider turns out to be no lesser person than Aragorn, the unrecognized and uncrowned king of all the forces of good, whose restoration to rule is, along with the destruction of the evil ring, the engine that moves the plot of the whole massive trilogy, The Lord of the Rings.
4. Make everybody fall out of the plane first, and then explain who they were and why they were in the plane to begin with.
5. A knife can be a symbol, but it also better be able to cut string. And if it represents cutting free, cutting loose, in the story’s beginning, it better not be used to prop up a bookcase and then forgotten later on.

Source for quotes: Plot

Ansen Dibell was an American science fiction author, editor, and poet, who also published books about fiction writing. She received a Master of Fine Arts degree (MFA) from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and earned a doctorate in 19th-century English literature. Dibell taught literature and creative writing at several colleges and universities, including Northern Kentucky University,[3] and her alma mater Keuka College. From 1983 she worked as editor at Writer’s Digest Books.

Source for photograph: Fantastic Fiction

by Amanda Patterson
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