Some excerpts:

Actually, The Mosquito Coast was very carefully planned out. All of them were. But if you plan a book too much, then the element of discovery and surprise, which all writing should offer, doesn’t occur. — Paul Theroux, interviewed by Michael Upchurch

You want to let things fly in writing as much as possible. That’s why I’ve come up with strategies to make it happen. It’s the same as the positive approach to revision. I’m always looking for the place that’s going to respond to nurturing, rather than trying to edit something down into some sort of crystalline appearance. There’s always time to do that. — A. J. Verdelle, interviewed by Nancy Middleton

Be patient with your story. When you leave a piece sit for some time and come back to it, you’ll likely see all sorts of things in there that you can build on. Certain verbs will seem out of place, until you realize what that verb is really telling you—that you’d meant to talk about something else in that spot. — Doug Lawson

If you think of poetry as another parallel, a short story wouldn’t be like an epic poem. It would be much more focused, much more like a sonnet. Nor would it make the novel’s great trek. It identifies smaller moments, works within a smaller scale. — Antonya Nelson, interviewed by Susan McInnis

Writing a first draft of a story — and this is the most important draft, for it’s essentially the genetic makeup of the story—is like having a hole pop out of my forehead and the story spilling forth like champagne froth. — Stephen Dixon

For me, the hardest part of writing is to come up with something, to pluck the words from thin air, from the vast, blank nothingness. But after that, it’s all rewriting, and that’s not so bad, and then by the eighth or ninth draft it’s looking so good you’ve almost forgotten what the labor pains really felt like. — Mary McGarry Morris

Issue #2 WA2$6.00