Part of being a writer is hearing the music in words while keeping an element of surprise in the language. Varying diction is one way to do this, dropping from high to low, borrowing from ordinary speech as well as elevated language. At the same time, my idea—and it’s not an idea shared by all the writers I admire, by any means—is that the prose should be so lucid that you’re not looking at the sentences.
—Siri Hustvedt, interviewed by Jennifer Levasseur and Kevin Rabalais

A short story, if it’s done right, can enter the mind almost as if it were an experience of one’s own and become part of one’s own store of memory. I remember novels with tremendous vividness and love, but I never mistake them for my own experience. But, I have read short stories that I sometimes have difficulty separating from my own experience.—Tobias Wolff, interviewed by Jim Schumock

What you push in the reader’s face is very often what you’re least secure about. And as you grow more secure about it, you think about it less and you have less necessity to assert it.—Russell Banks, interviewed by Rob Trucks

Past tense seems to give the reader notice that the voice already knows something that is about to happen, and this builds a tension. Present tense means the voice doesn’t know what’s going on either, but there’s an immediacy which seems to bring the reader closer to the voice and the experience, but might sacrifice the tension which would have to be developed in other ways, such as a constant hammering, a rhythm of events, so that the reader expects something to happen again and again.—Carolyn Chute, interviewed by Barbara Stevens

Issue #10 WA10$6.00