I Am Not Quite Myself, I Think.but

For Peace Of Mind, I Will Lie About Any Thing At Any Time.

I Know When A Story Is Finished When There Is Not A Single Thing More I Can Think To Do To It. And Since I Know At The Start What The Last Line Will Be, I Know When I've Reached That Point As Logically As I Can That It's Finished. As For The Rewriting-it's Not Foolproof, Of Course, But If You're Honest About Having Thought Of Every Possibility And You Still Come Back To What You Have, What More Can You Do?

Journalism Taught Me How To Write A Sentence That Would Make Someone Want To Read The Next One. You Are Trained To Get Rid Of Anything Nonessential. You Go In, You Start Writing Your Article, Assuming A Person's Going To Stop Reading The Minute You Give Them A Reason. So The Trick Is: Don't Give Them One.

I've Always Known When I Start A Story What The Last Line Is. It's Always Been The Case, Since The First Story I Ever Wrote. I Don't Know How It's Going To Get There, But I Seem To Need The Destination. I Need To Know Where I End Up. It Never Changes, Ever.

I Started Writing By Doing Small Related Things But Not The Thing Itself, Circling It And Getting Closer. I Had No Idea How To Write Fiction. So I Did Journalism Because There Were Rules I Could Learn. You Can Teach Someone To Write A News Story. They Might Not Write A Great One, But You Can Teach That Pretty Easily.