She Won't Give Him Back His Look.

Nights Without Beginning That Had No End. Talking About A Past As If It'd Really Happened. Telling Themselves That This Time Next Year, This Time Next Year, Things Were Going To Be Different.

But I Can Hardly Sit Still. I Keep Fidgeting, Crossing One Leg And Then The Other. I Feel Like I Could Throw Off Sparks, Or Break A Window--maybe Rearrange All The Furniture.

If We're Lucky, Writer And Reader Alike, We'll Finish The Last Line Or Two Of A Short Story And Then Just Sit For A Minute, Quietly. Ideally, We'll Ponder What We've Just Written Or Read; Maybe Our Hearts Or Intellects Will Have Been Moved Off The Peg Just A Little From Where They Were Before. Our Body Temperature Will Have Gone Up, Or Down, By A Degree. Then, Breathing Evenly And Steadily Once More, We'll Collect Ourselves, Writers And Readers Alike, Get Up, "created Of Warm Blood And Nerves" As A Chekhov Character Puts It, And Go On To The Next Thing: Life. Always Life.

A Great Danger, Or At Least A Great Temptation, For Many Writers Is To Become Too Autobiographical In Their Approach To Their Fiction. A Little Autobiography And A Lot Of Imagination Are Best.

My Circumstances Of Unrelieved Responsibility And Permanent Distraction Necessitated The Short Story Form.