Cynicism Is Easy. An Optimist Is A

One Of Those Out-of-the-ordinary Days That Made Sense Of The Slew Of Ordinary Days. New York Had A Way Of Doing That. Every Now And Then The City Shook Its Soul Out. It Assailed You With An Image, Or A Day, Or A Crime, Or A Terror, Or A Beauty So Difficult To Wrap Your Mind Around That You Had To Shake Your Head In Disbelief.

If You Have A Structure Beforehand, You're Sort Of Stuffing Your Story Into A Pre-assembled Box. You Don't Want That To Happen. What You Want In Your Writing Is To Have A Sort Of Wildness That Occurs. And Then, Out Of The Wildness, A Structure Emerges.

Stories Are There To Be Told, And Each Story Changes With The Telling. Time Changes Them. Logic Changes Them. Grammar Changes Them. History Changes Them. Each Story Is Shifted Side-ways By Each Day That Unfolds. Nothing Ends. The Only Thing That Matters, As Faulkner Once Put It, Is The Human Heart In Conflict With Itself. At The Heart Of All This Is The Possibility, Or Desire, To Create A Piece Of Art That Talks To The Human Instinct For Recovery And Joy.

Ultimately, You Can Only Ever Write What You Know. It's Logically And Philosophically Impossible To Write What You Don't Know.

...and It Strikes Her, As She Walks, That Borders, Like Hatred, Are Exaggerated Precisely Because Otherwise They Would Cease To Exist Altogether.