I understand what something short should be like. I understand beauty in that form. If I start extending, somehow I kind of lose my bearings.
Life is short, very short, and what are we doing here if not trying to become more generous and loving?
If I can be more efficient, I’m actually being more respectful to the reader, which then implies a greater intimacy with the reader.
According to me, your life is going to be a gradual process of becoming kinder and more loving. Hurry up. Speed it along. Start right now.
It really strikes me how much of your energy in America, especially if you’re from a working back-ground, is spent just keeping your head above water. It really saps your grace and your strength.
The generalizing writer is like the passionate drunk, stumbling into your house mumbling: I know I’m not being clear, exactly, but don’t you kind of feel what I’m feeling?
I love the idea that more people would read short fiction. I think it’s such a humanizing form. It softens the boundaries between people.
Do those things that incline you toward the big questions, and avoid the things that would reduce you and make you trivial.
It’s funny with fiction – once you cut something, it hasn’t happened anymore.
So here’s something I know to be true, although it’s a little corny, and I don’t quite know what to do with it:.
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 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.
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.
If a writer understands his work as something that originates with him but then, with any luck, gets away from him, then what he needs is someone who can grasp the potential of the piece and lead him to that higher ground.
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.
Humor is what happens when we’re told the truth quicker and more directly than we’re used to.
If I’m writing a story and you’re reading it, or vice versa, you took time out of your day to pick up my book. I think the one thing that will kill that relationship is if you feel me condescending to you in the process.
I think even like Saddam Hussein or Hitler would wake up and say, “I think it’s going to be a good day. I’m gonna do some really important work.” And given their definition of good, they went out and did horrible things.
I think the trick of being a writer is to basically put your cards out there all the time and be willing to be as in the dark about what happens next as your reader would be at that time.
It’s a big world, and I really like it.