What You Are Will Make You What

In A Very Real Way, One Writes A Story To Find Out What Happens In It. Before It Is Written It Sits In The Mind Like A Piece Of Overheard Gossip Or A Bit Of Intriguing Tattle. The Story Process Is Like Taking Up Such A Piece Of Gossip, Hunting Down The People Actually Involved, Questioning Them, Finding Out What Really Occurred, And Visiting Pertinent Locations. As With Gossip, You Can't Be Too Surprised If Important Things Turn Up That Were Left Out Of The First-heard Version Entirely; Or If Points Initially Made Much Of Turn Out To Have Been Distorted, Or Simply Not To Have Happened At All.

There Are Three Types Of Actions : Purposeful, Habitual, And Gratuitous. Characters , To Be Immediate And Apprehensible, Must Be Presented By All Three.

Fiction -- At Least For Me -- Requires Long, Relatively Uninterrupted Time Stretches In Which To Bring It To Fruition. I've Never Been A Two-hour-in-the-morning Writer, Who Could Put In Another Six Hours On Sunday Afternoon. For Me, A Novel Requires Weeks Of Living In A Largely Mental And Wholly Internal Landscape. Everything Else Has To Be Relegated To The Odd Hour Here, The Bit Of Time There. Sadly, However, Uninterrupted Time Blocks Are Not What Life Doles Out Today To Any Of Us With Regularity.

Ah, Well, During The Middle Ages, Religion Was Often Able To Redeem Art. Today, However, Art Is About The Only Thing That Can Redeem Religion, And The Clerics Will Never Forgive Us For That.

The Reason For Privacy Is Not So That People Will Not Know You Go To The Bathroom. It's To Allow Certain Things To Go On That You Don't Want Other People To Know About, When All Is Said And Done. But The Things I Don't Want Other People To Know About Are Not My Sex Life.