I Don't Feel I Have

I Don't Pare Down Much. I Write The Beginning Of A Story In A Notebook And It Comes Out Very Close To What It Will Be In The End. There Is Not Much Deliberateness About It.

I Don't Believe, In The End, That There Is Any Such Thing As No Style. Even A Very Neutral, Plain Style, One That Doesn't Use Colloquialisms, Lyrical Flourishes, Heavy Supplies Of Metaphor, Etc., Is A Style, And It Becomes A Writer's Characteristic Style Just As Much As A Thicker, Richer Deployment Of Idiom And Vocabulary.

I Often Pose Questions To Myself And Want The Answers. The Questions May Be Psychological Or Emotional. Or They May Involve Botany Or [...] Physiology. [...] I Am Very Curious About Strangers I Observe - As In A Bus Line. I Am Very Attached To Finding Out Answers.

Nearly Every Morning, A Certain Woman In Our Community Comes Running Out Of Her House With Her Face White And Her Overcoat Flapping Wildly. She Cries Out, "emergency, Emergency," And One Of Us Runs To Her And Holds Her Until Her Fears Are Calmed. We Know She Is Making It Up; Nothing Is Has Really Happened To Her. But We Understand, Because There Is Hardly One Of Us Who Has No Been Moved At Some Time To Do Just What She Has Done, And Every Time, It Has Taken All Our Strength, And Even The Strength Of Our Friends And Families, Too, To Keep Us Quiet.

We All Have An Ongoing Narrative Inside Our Heads, The Narrative That Is Spoken Aloud If A Friend Asks A Question. That Narrative Feels Deeply Natural To Me. We Also Hang On To Scraps Of Dialogue. Our Memories Don’t Usually Serve Us Up Whole Scenes Complete With Dialogue. So I Suppose I’m Saying That I Like To Work From What A Character Is Likely To Remember, From A More Interior Place.