Because your goal is a complete rough draft of a novel, and every rough draft, by being complete, is perfect.

The fact is that the same sequence of days can arrange themselves into a number of different stories.

In his 30 years of broadcasting and publishing fiction, Garrison Keillor has set the laugh bar pretty high.

I readily admit it is easy to make of horses what we will. Silent, in some ways reserved, they allow us to train them, and to project our ideas upon them; to ride and drive them, and to make them symbolic, perhaps to a greater degree than any other species.

When I came home for the summer after my first year of college, I told my mother that my best friend and I were driving to California. She laughed out loud - 2,000 miles in a what? Well, my best friend had an old Chevy. What could go wrong?

I loved the house the way you would any new house, because it is populated by your future, the family of children who will fill it with noise or chaos and satisfying busy pleasures.

Charles Dickens was an avid seeker of names - he read directories and looked for odd names on gravestones.