Ambition Like A Liquid Ruby Stains.

Dictators During The Entire History Of This Planet Have Used Similar Techniques. By Not Letting The People Of Their Country Know What Conditions Existed Outside Their Boundaries, They Could Get The People To Fight To Stay In Those Conditions. It Was The Old Adage: Convince A Slave That He's Free , And He Will Fight To Maintain His Slavery .

You Know What I Do? I Listen To Other People, Stumbling About With Their Half Thoughts And Half Sentences And Their Clumsy Feelings That They Can't Express, And It Hurts Me. So I Go Home And Burnish It And Polish It And Weld It To A Rhythmic Frame, Make The Dull Colors Gleam, Mute The Garish Artificiality To Pastels, So It Doesn't Hurt Any More: That's My Poem. I Know What They Want To Say, And I Say It For Them.

I Want To Read About A Character Doing Something Fairly Quiet Where I Can Picture Who The Character Is, And What Their Attitude Towards The World Is - Which I'm A Lot More Interested In Than What They Do Under The Pressure Of A Gunfight.

Actions Are Interesting To Watch. I Learn About The Actors. Their Movements Are Emblems Of The Tensions In This Internal Landscape, Which Their Actions Resolve. About-to-act Is An Interesting State To Experience, Because I Am Conscious Of Just Those Tensions. Acting Itself Feels Fairly Dull; It Not Only Resolves, It Obliterates Those Tensions From My Consciousness. Acting Is Only Interesting As It Leads To New Tensions That, Irrelevantly, Cause Me To Act Again.

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.