If you follow the trail of your own enthusiastically repeated stories, you will begin to rediscover the things that invigorate and enliven you.
We tell the real truth of our life by the stories we repeatedly tell.
Begin as if you will finish. Let the story be told that you had the courage to begin.
For the source of the short story is usually lyrical. And all writers speak from, and speak to, emotions eternally the same in all of us: love, pity, terror do not show favorites or leave any of us out.
Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them.
Daydreaming had started me on the way; but story writing once I was truly in its grip, took me and shook me awake.
The first thing we see about a short story is its mystery. And in the best short stories, we return at the last to see mystery again.
Every story teaches you how to write that story but not the next story.
Every story teaches me how to write it. Unfortunately, it doesn’t teach me how to write the next one.
A story is not the same thing when it ends as it was when it began.
Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer’s own life.
First, I write down all I know about the story, at length and in detail. Then I sink the iceberg and let some of it float up just a little.
It occurred to me that everyone’s story matters to themselves, so the more I listened, the more she wanted to talk.
Stories distribute the suffering so that it can be borne.
Anyone at any age is able to tell the story of his or her life with authority.
When you read a short story, you come out a little more aware and a little more in love with the world around you. What I want is to have the reader come out just 6 percent more awake to the world.
My stories, I can understand them as a little toy that you wind up and you put it on the floor and it just goes under the coach. That I get. Beyond that, I’m a little lost.
That seems to be the definition of ‘novel’ for me: a story that hasn’t yet discovered a way to be brief.
Chekhov – shall I be blunt? – is the greatest short story writer who ever lived.
Back in 1992, I had my first story accepted by ‘The New Yorker.’