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Everything has to be pulling weight in a short story for it to be really of the first order.

In journalism, there has always been a tension between getting it first and getting it right.

Good stories are driven by conflict, tension, and high stakes.

Stories need stupid decisions that, at the time, seem absolutely rational and necessary. Without stupid decisions, the world isn't thrown out of balance, and so there's no need for a 'rest of the story' to balance it back.

Every story has its demands.

You're under pressure when you produce facts. You're working with facts in journalism, but you're under all kinds of formal constraints; there are expectations.

Sometimes I get the story wrong, or it's the wrong story, and then things don't work.

In seeking truth you have to get both sides of a story.

There is pressure when you have a very big book like 'Shadow Divers' to follow up with something big. But you can't let that pressure determine what you do. You just look for the best stories, and when you find a great one, you tell it.

In a lot of cases, writers discover that the novel needs to begin later in the action than they'd first thought.