As a writer you can and should expect to hear conflicting responses to your story.

Love is anticipation and memory, uncertainty and longing. It’s unreasonable, of course. Nothing begins with so much excitement and hope and pleasure as love, except maybe writing a story. And nothing fails as often, except writing stories. And like a story, love must be troubled to be interesting.

Reading is also a creative activity if you're doing it right. You can learn more from a story that's left the tracks than from a successful story.

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.

As a writer you can and should expect to hear conflicting responses to your story.

If you think about it, fiction is nothing more than gossip about the people you've made up.

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