To Write A Short Story, You Have

Perhaps One Would Be Wise When Young Even To Avoid Thinking Of Oneself As A Writer - For There's Something A Little Stopped And Satisfied, Too Healthy, In That. Better To Think Of Writing, Of What One Does As An Activity, Rather Than An Identity - To Write, I Write; We Write; To Keep The Calling A Verb Rather Than A Noun; To Keep Working At The Thing, At All Hours, In All Places, So That Your Life Does Not Become A Pose, A Pornography Of Wishing.

An Agony. The Exit Like The Entrance - But Reserved. A Palindrome: Gut-tug.

This Was Love, I Supposed, And Eventually I Would Come To Know It. Someday It Would Choose Me And I Would Come To Know Its Spell, For Long Stretches And Short, Two Times, Maybe Three, And Then Quite Probably It Would Choose Me Never Again.

Basically, I Realized I Was Living In That Awful Stage Of Life Between Twenty-six To And Thirty-seven Known As Stupidity. It's When You Don't Know Anything, Not Even As Much As You Did When You Were Younger, And You Don't Even Have A Philosophy About All The Things You Don't Know, The Way You Did When You Were Twenty Or Would Again When You Were Thirty-eight.

Writers Have No Real Area Of Expertise. They Are Merely Generalists With A Highly Inflamed Sense Of Punctuation.