What you create when you're teaching fiction writing is a kind of literary salon, not a social club or a mutual admiration society, not a debating society, not a repair shop, not a fight club or a soap box. It's a place to have a conversation about a story.

I was always writing. I just didn't know if I was any good.

There were the fairy tales my father told to me at bedtime. All the standards. I thought my father invented wolves.

You lose a wallet or keys or something and you notice in a second, but your life can go missing and you don't even know it.

With each draft, the work gets better, and usually that means tighter. It means getting the precise word, not the approximate word.

You will feel discouraged; you will lose confidence in your abilities; you will be bored with the characters–and the only way to overcome these obstacles is to write your way through them. And writing always works.

Place is character. And all writing is regional.