All the words I use in my stories can be found in the dictionary-it's just a matter of arranging them into the right sentences.
For a short-story writer, a story is the combination of what the writer supposed the story would likely be about - plus what actually turned up in the course of writing.
There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.
Chekhov - shall I be blunt? - is the greatest short story writer who ever lived.
My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.
A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it.
The more original a short-story writer, the odder looking the assortment of things he or she puts together for a story.
My favorite short-story writer is John Cheever
You learn by writing short stories. Keep writing short stories. The money's in novels, but writing short stories keeps your writing lean and pointed.
Tell the readers a story! Because without a story, you are merely using words to prove you can string them together in logical sentences.
To imagine yourself inside another person. . . is what a story writer does in every piece of work; it is his first step, and his last too, I suppose.
I love the necessary ambiguity of short stories - there simply isn't time to render every detail, so much of the story that orbits the literal prose must happen in the reader's imagination. Who knows, maybe the dwindling attention spans means a lucrative future for short story writers.
The only reason for being a professional writer is that you can't help it.
Tom Kealey might be my favorite short story writer and this astonishing collection is long overdue.
So it happened at last: I was about to become a thief, a cheap milk-stealer. Here was your lash-in-the-pen genius, your one story-writer: a thief.
In a rough way the short story writer is to the novelist as a cabinetmaker is to a house carpenter.
Hackle may be the best absurdist story writer working today.
Los Angeles is a Yukon for crime-story writers.
Find the key emotion; this may be all you need know to find your short story.
Anecdotes don't make good stories. Generally I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about.
