Writing Is One Of The Most Assertive

If I Stop To Think About Fans, Or Best-selling, Or Not Best-selling, Or Good Reviews, Or Not-good Reviews, It Just Becomes Too Much. It's Like Staring At The Mirror All Day.

...that In Spite Of Living In A Mansion An American Is Not Above Wearing A Pair Of Secondhand Pants, Bought For Fifty Cents.

For That Story, I Took As My Subject A Young Woman Whom I Got To Know Over The Course Of A Couple Of Visits. I Never Saw Her Having Any Health Problems - But I Knew She Wanted To Be Married.

It Was Not In My Nature To Be An Assertive Person. I Was Used To Looking To Others For Guidance, For Influence, Sometimes For The Most Basic Cues Of Life. And Yet Writing Stories Is One Of The Most Assertive Things A Person Can Do. Fiction Is An Act Of Willfulness, A Deliberate Effort To Reconceive, To Rearrange, To Reconstitute Nothing Short Of Reality Itself. Even Among The Most Reluctant And Doubtful Of Writers, This Willfulness Must Emerge. Being A Writer Means Taking The Leap From Listening To Saying, "listen To Me."

We Are All #humans And We All Make #mistakes. We #hurt People Even If We Don't Want To.