Thowing turnips

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I keep this quote by my desk. I absolutely love it.

"I cannot tell you what work I spent upon the fugue scene! Brain work excites and exhausts me so preposterously, I prowl up and down till every limb aches fit to come off, and I cry like fifty fools, and rub my hair on end, and break or crush anything that is between my fingers for its sins — and am so found by the maid who announces callers or some other detail of sub-lunary existence! And then I feel inclined to throw turnips at my own head and ask myself — if you're played out like this over a tale the length of a halfpenny tract, whereabouts would you be with a novel?"
— Juliana Horatia Ewing, 1884

Every protagonist needs ...

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Stephanie Cowell offers this quote from Donald Maass:

"Every protagonist needs a tortuous need, a consuming fear, an aching regret, a visible dream, a passionate longing, an exquisite lust, an inner lack, a fatal weakness, an irresistible plan, a noble idea, an underlying hope… "