If No One Knows You, Then You

Writing Short Stories Was Kind Of Like I Was Cheating The Whole Time, In Some Way. I Went Back And Forth Between Writing The Novels And Sort Of Sneaking Out To Work On Stories Occasionally. These Stories Were Written Over The Last 10 Years Or So, As I Was Taking Breaks From The Novels I've Written.

A Lot Of Time, With Stories, I'll Start Out With A Title And Try To Dream Myself Into The Story That It Evokes - A Kind Of Subconscious Exercise In Which I'm Trawling For Some Kind Of Entryway Into Fiction.

Plot And Scene Are Still The Hardest Things For Me, Though I Think They're The Building Blocks Of What Makes A Story Work.

I Feel Like I Go Back And Forth Between Being Fairly Fatalistic And Really More Hopeful About The Possibilities Of Things Changing. And Will See How That Goes In This Election Cycle. That Will Probably Strongly Affect How Fatalistic I Am.

A Lot Of Times In My Short Fiction There Isn't Much Dramatized Scene - There Are A Lot Of Short, Interconnected Bits, Snippets Of Conversation, Continual Action, And So On. I Frequently Rely Pretty Heavily On Voice.