I love film and, particularly, shorts. You don't get to see them often, and they're a great little form, like a short story.
You can write a short story in two hours. Two hours a day, you have a novel in a year.
I pretty much drink a cup of coffee, write in my journal for a while, and then sit at a computer in my office and torture the keys. My one saving grace as a writer is that, if I'm having trouble with the novel I'm writing, I write something else, a poem or a short story. I try to avoid writer's block by always writing something.
I've been wrestling with Kafka since I was an adolescent. I think he's a great aphorist, a great letter writer, a great diarist, a great short story writer, and a great novelist - I'd put novelist last.
I was writing fiction in my 20s but in a pretty undisciplined way - late at night, maybe, after I'd peeled myself from the walls of a nightclub and crawled home along the gutters. But I slowly became more serious and more devout in my work, and I fell seriously in love with the short story form.
The short story is very good at looking at shadow psychologies and how the system breaks down underneath.
My highest point was the first thing I won, a short story competition in a women's magazine in the Eighties. It was the first time I'd had my writing validated, and the first thing I'd ever shown anyone else.
A short story is something that I think can be intuited and envisioned and held in your mind almost at once.
The great thing about a short story is that it doesn't have to trawl through someone's whole life; it can come in glancingly from the side.
A subplot is a distinguishing characteristic of the novel; the short story, for example, does not need subplots.
The most-asked question when someone describes a novel, movie or short story to a friend probably is, 'How does it end?' Endings carry tremendous weight with readers; if they don't like the ending, chances are they'll say they didn't like the work. Failed endings are also the most common problems editors have with submitted works.
I don't think I would have written a combat novel if I had just had peacetime military training. I think, in fact, I probably would have remained a poet and just written a short story every now and then.
I wrote my first short story in third grade.
I do just as much world-building in a short story as I do for a novel.
I've always been a little bit more of a novel reader than a short story reader. I think the first books that made me want to be a writer were novels.
I really do believe some people are naturally novelists and some people are short story writers. For me, when I was in middle school or high school, I started with novels.
