You Can't Count On Notoriety

A Novel Requires A Certain Kind Of World-building And Also A Certain Kind Of Closure, Ultimately. Whereas With A Short Story You Have This Sense That There Are Hinges That The Reader Doesn't See.

Our Sense Of Self Is A Kind Of Construct. It Is In Some Ways Like A Novel, And It's Like A Fabric Of Fictions That We Patch Together From Memory.

Plot Was Always Secondary In My Mind.

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.

The Earliest Impetuses For Writing, For Me, Were Simply The Strange Things I Happened To Notice In My Everyday Life, Stuff I Read About In The Grocery Store Tabloids My Mom Bought, Situations That Struck Me As Compelling, Anecdotes I'd Heard, Images, Words, Metaphors.