I assemble stories-me and a hundred million other people-at the sentence level. Not by coming up with a sweeping story line.
I’m not first and foremost interested in story and the what-happens, but I’m interested in who’s telling it and how they’re telling it and the effects of whatever happened on the characters and the people.
Obviously, in journalism, you’re confined to what happens. And the tendency to embellish, to mythologize, it’s in us. It makes things more interesting, a closer call. But journalism taught me how to write a sentence that would make someone want to read the next one.
I had a mother I could only seem to please with verbal accomplishments of some sort or another. She read constantly, so I read constantly. If I used words that might have seemed surprising at a young age, she would recognize that and it would please her.
In my head there’s a broken balcony I fall off of when I speak.
When the beer is gone, so are they – flexing their cars on up the boulevard.
A love affair begins with a fantasy. For instance, that the beloved will always be there.
He wondered how we know that what happens to us isn’t good.
For peace of mind, I will lie about any thing at any time.
I wanted to be a veterinarian, but slipped up when I hit organic chemistry.
The worst of it is over now, and I can’t say that I am glad. Lose that sense of loss – you have gone and lost something else.
I thought, my love is so good, why isn’t it calling the same thing back.
I moved through the days like a severed head that finishes a sentence.
Since his mother died I have seen him steam a cucumber thinking it was zucchini. That’s the kind of thing that turns my heart right over.
The year I began to say vahz instead of vase, a man I barely knew nearly accidentally killed me.
I do feel that if you can write one good sentence and then another good sentence and then another, you end up with a good story.
I’ve always known when I start a story what the last line is. It’s always been the case, since the first story I ever wrote. I don’t know how it’s going to get there, but I seem to need the destination. I need to know where I end up. It never changes, ever.
There’s so much I can’t read because I get so exasperated. Someone starts describing the character boarding the plane and pulling the seat back. And I just want to say, Babe, I have been downtown. I have been up in a plane. Give me some credit.
An idea might spark an essay, but never a story.
I probably have less revision than those who have that wonderful rush of story to tell – you know, I can’t wait to tell you what happened the other day. It comes tumbling out and maybe then they go back and refine. I kind of envy that way of working, but I just have never done it.