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

In revision, your imagination becomes deeply engaged with your material. It's when you come to know your characters and begin to perceive their motivations and values.

We all sleep with the corpses of our dead lovers.

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.

A lack of narrative structure, as you know, will cause anxiety.

Drug programs began to turn their attention and money away from prevention and into maintenance. Methadone was cheaper than social workers, I suppose.

Fiction begins with the senses, and the senses go to work in a place.