Some excerpts from Issue Three:

I’m very happy with third person. I find writing in first person enormously constraining. It’s like having a bloody straitjacket on, and who needs it? I love being able to back up as far as possible and literally look at the landscape from a vantage point above, or I love being able to get directly close to the characters and even, in some sense, get inside them. —E. Annie Proulx, interviewed by Michael Upchurch

I don’t expect them to have wonderful characters, wonderful plot, or wonderful structure. That takes a long time. But if they have a sense of the language as a tool, that’s everything… as long as there’s a rhythm to the sentences, and they know not to rely heavily on adverbs, and what a verb can do. That’s what I mean by understanding language. —David Long

The central questions for me: Who should be telling the story? And why at this particular moment? Once I’ve established those details—which sound like simple decisions, but are not at all simple—the stories tend to have their own tone and setting and sense of movement. Point of view and timing present different sets of freedoms and restrictions. —Antonya Nelson, interviewed by Susan McInnis

Dialogue should do two things: it should sound like people talking, minus the pauses and umms and stumbling, and it should move your story forward.
—Melanie Bishop

Something that Wallace Stegner said: "We manage to breed saints, brutes, and mudheads in all sorts of typographies and climates." In other words, he’s saying that place does not determine character, but it does affect how we relate to place, how we respond to certain types of geography…We’re wired, I think, for some kind of experience of place. As a fiction writer, it’s been very important for me to make the stories be specific. I don’t want a story that could happen anyplace. I want the story to be located. —David Long

The most interesting grammar book I’ve ever seen came out recently. It’s by Patricia T. O’Conner and it’s called Woe is I: The Grammarphobe’s Guide to Better English in Plain English. It’s not only informative but very creative and a fun read, and I don’t think you could say that about most grammar guides, necessary as they are. —Melanie Bishop

The shape of a paragraph can have a subtle effect on the reader. The smaller the paragraph, the more weight is given to the words contained therein. A succession of small paragraphs creates a sense of urgency for the reader. Paragraphs of varying length help keep the reader off-balance and interested. Even bland, standard paragraphs, such as the one you are presently reading, sometimes have their place. –George Clark

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