My general idea is that writers are megalomaniacal, single-minded, non-collaborative beings. That's what makes writing a novel so exciting. You are God.—Myla Goldberg, interviewed by Sarah Anne Johnson

The reason you have to revise is because you have to wait until you've forgotten how difficult writing was during that first draft. I am capable of writing a draft that I think is obvious, but when I give it to people to read, they say, "I don’t understand what happened." I find that writers sometimes want to steer their characters in a way that is not satisfying in fiction. They want to suggest something instead of actually making the characters do it. They take the reader right up to a confrontation and think they stop at a moment of great possibility, but they really stop before the conflict of the story begins.—Elizabeth McCracken, interviewed by Jennifer Levasseur and Kevin Rabalais

I see it in my students—this idea that I have spent all these hours, days, even weeks, on these pages, on this story, they must be good. Well, the truth is that it is quite possible that they aren't. It doesn't matter that you spent all this time on it. It still might not work.—Sigrid Nunez, interviewed by Robert Birnbaum

One of the most profound of our epics in Western literature reduces itself to a very elemental story: A man named Odysseus, after twenty years at war, just wants to get home.—John S. Walker

…home can bind your characters together and force them to work through their conflicts. After all, narratives don't just require conflict or tension—which we can have with any stranger on the highway, fleetingly. What a story requires is characters who are in conflict but can't walk away from each other.—Valerie Lake, interviewed by Peggy Adler

Also in issue 49, you'll find two full-page Focus pieces:

• Creating the Fictional Family, by Yelizaveta P. Renfro
• That Night by the Pool, by Justin Kramon

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