For Peace Of Mind, I Will Lie

I Think Of The Chimp, The One With The Talking Hands. In The Course Of The Experiment, That Chimp Had A Baby. Imagine How Her Trainers Must Have Thrilled When The Mother, Without Prompting, Began To Sign Her Newborn. Baby, Drink Milk. Baby, Play Ball. And When The Baby Died, The Mother Stood Over The Body, Her Wrinkled Hands Moving With Animal Grace, Forming Again And Again The Words: Baby, Come Hug, Baby Come Hug, Fluent Now In The Language Of Grief.

I Know When A Story Is Finished When There Is Not A Single Thing More I Can Think To Do To It. And Since I Know At The Start What The Last Line Will Be, I Know When I've Reached That Point As Logically As I Can That It's Finished. As For The Rewriting-it's Not Foolproof, Of Course, But If You're Honest About Having Thought Of Every Possibility And You Still Come Back To What You Have, What More Can You Do?

And I See That Not Touching For So Long Was A Drive To The Beach With The Windows Rolled Up So The Waves Feel That Much Colder.

We Can Only Die In The Future, I Thought; Right Now We Are Always Alive.

I Started Writing By Doing Small Related Things But Not The Thing Itself, Circling It And Getting Closer. I Had No Idea How To Write Fiction. So I Did Journalism Because There Were Rules I Could Learn. You Can Teach Someone To Write A News Story. They Might Not Write A Great One, But You Can Teach That Pretty Easily.