I asked Ring Lardner the other day how he writes his short stories, and he said he wrote a few widely separated words or phrases on a piece of paper and then went back and filled in the spaces.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
As a teenager I wrote to R.A. Lafferty. And he responded, too, with letters that were like R.A. Lafferty short stories, filled with elliptical answers to straight questions and simple answers to complicated ones.
I often feel newspapers are just filling up space. Of course, I also know people who write really long books.
Headline writing is tough because often times you are given a predetermined number of spaces and words depending on the layout and the type of the story.
Writers are the ones who figure out how to put their observations into words.
I can't tell you exactly how I found it. It was just a process of writing a lot of stories and reading a lot of stories that I admired and just working and working until the sentences sounded right and I was satisfied with them.
Writing is a marvelous adventure and very labor-intensive: those words run away and try to escape. They are very difficult to capture.
With short stories, you can always see the whole, but it's just so hard to get everything you want into that small form.
The tough thing about writing is you go into a room alone, you close the door and you do your work.
I stopped writing short fiction early on - I was never really good at it, and I never liked the results. So I stopped trying to fit the material I was working with into these tidy little short fiction packages.
I was filling entire school notebooks with stories by Grade 3. Of course, they were double-spaced, and the handwriting was huge.