I Tend To Like Order

You Can Recognize In Your Own Reading Habits What Writers Are Doing That Works And What Doesn't. I'm Becoming Much More Aware Of That After Reading A Decade Of Student Stories.

Plot Was Always Secondary In My Mind.

The Danger In Writing About A World You Don't Know Very Well Is That You Can Get Lost In It, And Sometimes I'll End Up With A Hundred Pages I Don't Know What To Do With.

Fiction Is A Particular Kind Of Rhetoric, A Way Of Thinking That I Think Can Be Useful In Your Life. It Asks You To Image The World Through Someone Else's Eyes, And It Allows You To Try To Empathize With Situations That You Haven't Actually Experienced.

I'm Working With Fragments A Lot Of The Time And The Connective Tissue Isn't There Yet. I Think Of It The Way Comics Work. You Have A Block Here And A Block Here, And There's This White Space In Between. Somehow Your Mind Makes The Leap To Connect Those Two Blocks. Finding A Way To Trick Your Mind Into Connecting Those Blocks Is One Of The Fun Things For Me About Writing. You Can Have Those Leaps That Will Emerge Into Something, If You're Lucky.