Making all of those words work together is difficult. It took a lot of cleaning up, a lot of rewriting scenes in order to make them more vivid. I used everything - every oddity I've ever seen on the side of the road, every interesting memory I could make relevant.

I've learned so much from my professors and have been fortunate to have had so many good ones, including Frederick and Steven Barthelme, Edward Carey, Jim Magnuson, and Elizabeth McCracken.

Perhaps adding a line or two of dialogue to try to better capture an emotion. But I've found that if the story isn't there in the beginning, right from the start, I generally can't beat it into shape no matter how much rewriting I do.

I don't know what people want, really. Does somebody have to die? What is meant by resolution? These are questions that I don't quite know what to do with. That being said, I did want the characters to be changed by the end of the book. But will what they've gone through alter their lives from this point forward, i.e. will they make different (better) choices? Probably not.

I think training your instinct comes from writing and reading. There's no big secret. And reading slush helps, as well; I'd recommend everyone edit a literary magazine at some point. It's time-consuming, but there's a lot to learn from other writers who are also learning. The patterns (twelve stories about whales in this batch?) are also interesting.

I've learned a lot about language from reading slush. You can immediately tell if a writer is in control of the narrative. This writer will avoid using too many words like "possibly," "probably," "maybe," "perhaps," etc. He/she will avoid using clichés, as well as a lot of metaphors, and won't take four sentences to say what they could in one (or write a great sentence and follow it up with a bunch of stuff that just weakens it).

I think there simply comes a point at which you're beating your head against the wall with revision, when you're making something different but not better. For me, revision usually has more to do with making the language prettier, finding clearer images, using more active verbs.