But those words were only the middle of the story. There was a beginning here, too.
All we had was her room, her stories, and the quiet that settled in as we tried in vain to spread ourselves out and fill the space she’d left behind.
An ending was an ending. No matter how many pages of sentences and paragraphs of great stories led up to it, it would always have the last word.
So maybe it wasn’t the fairy tale. But those stories weren’t real anyway. Mine were.
So many versions of just one memory, and yet none of them were right or wrong. Instead, they were all pieces. Only when fitted together, edge to edge, could they even begin to tell the whole story.
Whether it was a song, a person, or a story, there was a lot you couldn’t know from just an excerpt, a glance, or part of a chorus.
But it was too early to know: there were always more pages to go, more words to be written, before the story was over.
Sometimes a cigar is just a smoke and a story’s just a story.
I like to end stories where the readers have a little room to run. They can resolve things as they like in their own mind.
I think telling stories is like pushing something. Pushing against uncreation itself, maybe.
I never have a thematic intention at the outset. The story informs the theme for me rather than the other way around. But as it happens, this is, at least to a degree, about getting old and the rapid passage of our lives.
The stories we hear in our childhood are the ones we remember all our lives.
But there’s one thing I’m sure about. An opening line should invite the reader to begin the story. It should say: Listen. Come in here. You want to know about this.
Sometimes stories cry out to be told in such loud voices that you write them just to shut them up.
I’m afraid of all kinds of things. I’m afraid of failing at whatever story I’m writing – that it won’t come up for me, or that I won’t be able to finish it.
You see something, then it clicks with something else, and it will make a story. But you never know when it’s going to happen.
I never saw any of my dad’s stories. My mother said he had piles and piles of manuscripts.
Stories are artifacts, not really made things which we create and can take credit for, but pre-existing objects which we dig up.
Story is honorable and trustworthy; plot is shifty, and best kept under house arrest.
There’s nothing like stories on a windy night when folks have found a warm place in a cold world.