I think it’s more important to first get the emotional logic right and then worry about the technical features. People often get it backward; they forget there’s an emotional logic—as if you can’t talk about emotional logic. But of course you can: Ask yourself what characters want, what they’re afraid of, what’s at stake in the story, what they stand to gain or lose, and in some sense what kind of emotional modality they’re living in. It keeps a story from becoming frigid. I think that means that it’s important to begin talking about a work by describing it, rather than saying, “I liked or didn’t like this, that, or the other.” To simply try to say what you saw in the story.—Charles Baxter

This arduous but blessed occupation, you know there’s something that feels selfish about it, that you have to understand. It is not an indulgence. If you have any gift for it at all, it is an obligation. The indulgences are what you give up to do it. You don’t give up your family to do it. You don’t give up being kind. You don’t give up being a person in the world. You give up the party, or the television, or whatever. I know every corner of how that feels.—Richard Bausch, interviewed by Jennifer Levasseur and Kevin Rabalais

One of the things I have to work on as a prose writer is to make sure something happens. I’m quite capable of having people just sitting around in chairs, thinking. The chair may be a terrific chair, very vivid! A great chair! But, after all, it’s a chair! You know, do these thinkers sitting in my chairs actually do anything? Do they ever get up?—Patricia Hampl, interviewed by Susan McInnis

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