Short stories and some short novels are close to poetry--with the fewest words they capture the essence of a situation, of a human being. It's like trying to pin down the eternal moment.

It’s over me like a ton of water, the things I don’t know.

Short stories and some short novels are close to poetry--with the fewest words they capture the essence of a situation, of a human being. It's like trying to pin down the eternal moment.

One thing I'd do was put a great writer's book beside the typewriter and... type out a beautiful and moving paragraph... and see those sentences rising up... and... think, 'Someday maybe I can write like that....' It was like a dream of possibilities for my own self. And maybe I began to know that there was no other way for the sentence... to... arouse the same feeling. The someone writing whose words were rising from the typewriter became like a mentor for me.... You shouldn't do it more than a few times because you must get on with your own work.