I am always considering the reader. Although this is admittedly kind of odd: Which reader? On what day? In what mood? For me, that “reader” is actually just me, if I had never read the story before.
As a writer I’m essentially just trying to impersonate a first-time reader, who picks up the story and has to decide, at every point, whether to keep going.
I’m very happy – if I can do even a little bit of work to get the short story out more, I’m thrilled.
I love the feeling of being on the hunt – the feeling that the story is refusing to be solved in some lesser way and is insisting that you see it on its highest terms.
I’m not thinking much about overall themes or preoccupations or anything like that. Instead I’m just trusting that, if I’m working hard, various notions and riffs and motifs and so on are very naturally suffusing the stories and the resulting book.
When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.
The Olive Garden is bringing back its ‘Pasta Pass,’ which lets you eat as much pasta as you want for seven weeks. In a related story, Chris Christie just suspended his campaign.
Earlier today, the jury at the Martha Stewart trial reached a verdict. Martha was found guilty on all charges. In a related story, there’s a huge sale at K-Mart.
Tom Cruise’s attorney said he is going to sue anyone who claims he is gay. In a related story, Ricky Martin’s attorney has been hospitalized for exhaustion.
Today, Angelina Jolie met with Pope Francis at the Vatican. Long story short: She adopted him.
It’s been reported that some of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s opponents have been circulating naked pictures of Arnold on the Internet. Yeah, in a related story, Arnold is leading the other candidates by four inches.
Graves they say are warm’d by glory; Foolish words and empty story.
It is an ancient story Yet is it ever new.
I’m a conduit for telling people’s stories. It’s a privilege.
I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language.
It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.
Myth is the hidden part of every story, the buried part, the region that is still unexplored because there are as yet no words to enable us to get there. Myth is nourished by silence as well as by words.
Today each of you is the object of the other’s reading, one reads in the other the unwritten story.
The fact of storytelling hints at a fundamental human unease, hints at human imperfection. Where there is perfection there is no story to tell.
Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose its moorings or lose its orientations. even in silence we are living our stories.