Writing craft

That’s right. Should I stop? (laughs) When I was teaching I would always tell students…they would want to write these stories, these novels and give me these very skeletal type things. I would say, “Go back, go back. See what’s there. See what’s there as clearly as you possibly can.” They’d say, “No, I’ll go back and fill that in later.” I would always say. “It’s not a matter of filling it in. What you see is not just an object, the objects in your fiction have to take you beyond that in to some sort of other realm… in the realm of pure meaning. You can’t go back and fill it in later. It’s a door that you have to open and walk through. The physicality of the world is a door that you will open and you walk through it and if you are not seeing it you are not going to get there. There is just no way to get there without seeing these things. Right from The Risk Pool, one of the ways we trace Sam Hall in that novel, is through his car. He starts out driving a great big gas guzzling old car. By the end, of the novel he’s driving a tiny little Subaru, the headlights of which don’t work. That’s not my interest in cars there.