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 revise and revise and revise. I'm not even sure "revise" is the right word. I work a story almost to death before it's done.

We don't want emotion handed to us - that's not emotion. You have to build and come from the reader's soul.

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.

Like no other writer in contemporary American literature, Brock Clarke has a way of looking at us, I mean looking straight at us--warts, lots of warts, and beauty and hypocrisy and love, too, the gamut. And hes done it again in this brilliant The Happiest People in the World, a novel that is as hilarious and thought-provoking as it is ultimately, deadly, deadly serious. I for one am grateful hes out there--watching our every move.

To me, and I'm sure for other writers, too, characters come back and they relive again, but what about those characters who only live for a page or two? Or for five pages or 10 pages. I like to think they're still out there - still living - but for me they kind of die, too. It's kind of sad. I don't think about them anymore unless I give them life again.

I agonize over things like this - the order of things, section titles, all this architectural sort of stuff. Takes me years to figure out.