The Best Thing We Can Bring To

The Thing I've Discovered That Is A Help Is That There Isn't A Simple Virtue Or A Simple Vice. They're Always Connected. If You Have Tendency A, That You Loathe, You Can Almost Be Sure That Tendency B, Which You Love, Is Somehow Connected To It.

Writing A Story I Am Just Trying To Find Some Little Interesting Thing To Start Out With: Something Small, Even Trivial. Preferably Something That Doesn't Have A Lot Of Thematic Or Political Baggage - A Little Crumb That Is Interesting.

To Me, The Process Of Writing Is Just Reading What I've Written And - Like Running Your Hand Over One Of Those Mod Glass Stovetops To Find Where The Heat Is - Looking For Where The Energy Is In The Prose, Then Going In The Direction Of That. It's An Exercise In Being Open To Whatever Is There.

My Idea About Collections Is That You Write As Hard As You Can For Some Period And What You're Really Doing During That Time Is Hyper-focusing On The Individual Pieces - Trying To Make Each One Sit Up And Really Do Some Surprising Work.

I've Found That My First Drafts Are Not So Special. But The More I Work On Them, The Better They Get. They Are More Unique And Defensible.