“Generally, I don’t attempt to produce a certain number of words a day. The discipline is to work whether you are producing a lot or not, because the day you produce a lot is not necessarily the day you do your best work. So it’s trying to do it as regularly as you can without making it—without imposing too rigid a timetable on your self. That would be my ideal.”
“I guess it gets back to being a police reporter and working for this editor. His name was Dick Thomas, and he was an assistant city editor. You would send in a story and he would call back and say, “Are you sure that was Southwest Portland?” “Are you sure it was a one-way street?” “Are you sure the cop had a revolver and not a pistol?” It was beaten into you. You didn’t want him to call and when he called, you’d better have the answer. Working under that system for so many years, I learned to ask all the questions and to really look at the details. At first, it was just a matter of having the details for my story. As I got more into feature writing, I realized that the details were like little bombs going off. They could do so many things in the story and say so much in a way that I, as a writer, could not. I want the readers to do a lot of work for themselves and I want to tap into what’s inside their memories, their histories, and find things that will help them tell the story for themselves.”
“Remember: The easiest thing for the reader is to quit reading.”
“During the revision period I try to keep to some sort of discipline. I make myself revise whether I want to or not; in some ways, the more harsh and dyspeptic one feels the better—one is harsher with oneself. All the best cutting is done when one is sick of the writing.”
“Of the many definitions of story, the simplest may be this. It is a piece of writing that makes the reader want to find out what happens next. Good writers, it is often said, have the ability to make you keep on reading them whether you want to or not—the milk boils over—the subway stop is missed…But stories also protect us from chaos, and maybe that’s what we, unblinkered at the end of the 20th century, find ourselves craving. Implicit in the extraordinary revival of storytelling is the possibility that we need stories—that they are a fundamental unit of knowledge, the foundation of memory, essential to the way we make sense of our lives: the beginning, middle and end of our personal and collective trajectories. It is possible that narrative is as important to writing as the human body is to representational painting. We have returned to narratives—in many fields of knowledge—because it is impossible to live without them.”
“Not only do I read aloud, my editor reads aloud. During the process, Mike Gordon will read the story and pick out things he wants to talk about, and then he’ll call you over to his desk and you just sit there and he reads the story aloud, and it’s excruciating. It’s excruciating and incredibly powerful at the same time because you immediately see all the places where you’re slowing down because he can’t read well out loud. So if he’s not reading it well, then I’m probably not writing it well. So you go back and try again until you get it to flow a little better.”
“Reading is the creative center of a writer’s life.”
-Stephen King