What you can do with a short story that you can't do with a novel is punch someone in the gut, in the best of ways.

I feel like there are too many words in the world, and I think silence is so much more powerful than the glut of words.

What you can do with a short story that you can't do with a novel is punch someone in the gut, in the best of ways.

People have to follow their own strangeness. The minute they start making their own vision of the world flattened out so everyone can read it, they lose. I encourage people to be as awkward and odd on the page to capture their own way of seeing the world and not trying to see the world for other people.

But this is exactly why I read--and don't belong to a book group--because reading is the most individual thing there is. Why collectivize it? Didn't we have enough bad English teachers in school? Crowd sourcing and literature shouldn't mix.

I usually have a location and then I put the character there. I love place names. I think I'm tricking myself by being so specific - it suddenly becomes real to me. Just because I say it's Chicago, Illinois doesn't mean it's true, but place names sort of make me grounded and then I can put some people there.

As a professor I can't teach writing.