A Father Is A Man Who Fails

The Whole House Seemed To Exhale A Melancholy Breath Of Emptiness

He Looked So Profoundly Disappointed In Me That I Wondered For A Moment If He Was Someone I Knew.

I Took Comfort, As A Kid, In Knowing That Things Had Always Been As Awful And As Wonderful As They Were Now, That The World Was Always On The Edge Of Total Destruction.

I Might Spend 100 Pages Trying To Get To Know The World I'm Writing About: Its Contours, Who Are My Main Characters, What Are Their Relationships To Each Other, And Just Trying To Get A Sense Of What And Who This Book Is About. Usually Around That Point Of 100 Pages, I Start To Feel Like I'm Lost, I Have Too Much Material, It's Time To Start Making Some Choices. It's Typically At That Point That I Sit Down And Try To Make A Formal Outline And Winnow Out What's Not Working And What I'm Most Interested In, Where The Story Seems To Be Going.

Anything Good That I Have Written Has, At Some Point During Its Composition, Left Me Feeling Uneasy And Afraid. It Has Seemed, For A Moment At Least, To Put Me At Risk.