It's easier to die if others around you are dying.

Develop craftsmanship through years of wide reading.

I think it's important to leave spaces in a story for readers to fill in from their own experience.

He pressed his face into the fabric and breathed in slowly through his mouth and nose, hoping for the faintest smoke and mountain sage and salty sweet stink of Jack but there was no real scent, only the memory of it, the imagined power of Brokeback Mountain of which nothing was left but what he held in his hands.

No wonder, he thought, that the panhandle people were a godly lot, for they lived in sudden, violent atmospheres. Weather kept them humble.

It's easier to die if others around you are dying.

You know, one of the tragedies of real life is that there is no background music.