WRITERS ASK ISSUE 74 EXCERPTS
There was an exciting moment when I began to feel the stories putting out tentacles and connecting to the new material. That was one of the most thrilling writing experiences I ever had, because they seemed to have nothing in common. But I had an ongoing sense that these four stories were going to somehow be part of something bigger.—Jennifer Egan, interviewed by Jeremiah Chamberlin
I left that meeting feeling that there is a way to tell any story and that all we need is to find a way in—Ella Mei Yon
But if I opened with that line of dialogue? "You're sure? You're sure you're ready?" It would mean nothing—it would be ungrounded, a genderless, ageless voice echoing through white space—and I would have to store it in my short term memory and carry it with me for several sentences until it was at last contextualized. You don't want your reader working that hard at the start of a story. Moving from this world, with its myriad distractions, to the world of the page is hard enough.—Benjamin Percy
And that is how I start all my stories—with an image, a thought, a visual, a haunting. I start them like poems. I begin with a phrase, a saying, a moment, anything that has permeated my mind and has stayed with me, left me breathless, confused and wanting more. For me, that's the hardest part. To begin a story with something that has lingered within for a long, long time, something that has possessed me, and to end the story with that obsession, with something that instead lingers with you, the reader.—Melissa R. Sipin
I always set out to write a story of twelve pages. This is my dream length, and if you look at the table of contents, you'll see that I've failed with every story. None is on target. They have their own ideas about how long they ought to be, and they have their ways of making me listen.—Robert Boswell, interviewed by Andrew Scott
Fiction's a terrible delivery system for messages, but a fantastic—and maybe the only—delivery system for that kind of complexity in experience.—Matt Bell, Interviewed by Jeremiah Chamberlin