The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Good stories flow like honey. Bad stories stick in the craw. A bad story? One that cannot be absorbed on the first time of reading.
We're not keen on the idea of the story sharing its valence with the reader. But the reader's own life 'outside' the story changes the story.
A story is a kind of biopsy of human life. A story is both local, specific, small, and deep, in a kind of penetrating, layered, and revealing way.
You see, I am trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across - not to just depict life - or criticize it - but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me, you actually experience the thing. You can't do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful.
Why a ghost story? Well, I love them. They're fun to read - and, yes, fun to write.
As a reader, when the writer gets sentimental, you drift, because there's something fishy going on there. You recognize a moment that's largely about the writer and the writer's own need to believe in something that might not in fact exist. As a reader, you think, 'Where did the story go? Where did the person I'm reading about go?'
Stories mimic life like certain insects mimic leaves and twigs.
I can't remember a time when I didn't write or make up stories, because it seemed to come with reading.
The telling of stories creates the real world.
If you remain unsettled by a piece of writing, it means you are not watching the story from the outside; you've already taken a step towards it.