Vinegar: That's What Fear Smells Like.

The Answers Were Maddeningly Absent—it Was Like Trying To Remember A Song That You Knew Made You Feel A Certain Way, Without A Title, Artist, Or Even A Few Bars To Bring It Back.

Because You Can't Write Habitually And Well All The Time, You Have To Be Willing To Write Badly. That's How You Get The Regularity That Enables You To Be Present For The Good Stuff.

I Write My First Draft By Hand, At Least For Fiction. For Non-fiction, I Write Happily On A Computer, But For Fiction I Write By Hand, Because I'm Trying To Achieve A Kind Of Thoughtless State, Or An Unconscious Instinctive State. I'm Not Reading What I Write When I Wrote. It's An Unconscious Outpouring That's A Mess, And It's Many, Many Steps Away From Anything Anyone Would Want To Read. Creating That Way Seems To Generate The Most Interesting Material For Me To Work With, Though.

There Are So Many Ways To Go Wrong. All We've Got Are Metaphors, And They're Never Exactly Right. You Can Never Just Say. The. Thing.

If You Don't Have People That The Reader Cares About And Stories That Are Gripping, You've Got Nothing.