All right, so you shut the door, and you write down a first draft, at white heat, because that energy has been growing in you all through the prewriting stage and when released at last, is incandescent. You trust yourself and the story and you write.

[...]

Then it cools down and you cool down, and arrive, probably somewhat chilled and rueful, at the next stage. Your story is full of ugly, stupid bits. You distrust it now, and that's as it should be. But you still have to trust yourself. You have to know that you can make it better. Unless you're a genius or have extremely low standards, composition is followed by critical, patient revision, with the thinking mind turned on.

I can trust myself to write my story at white heat without asking any questions of it - if I know my craft through practice - if I have at least a sense of where this story's going - and if when it's got there, I'm willing to turn right round and go over it and over it, word by word, idea by idea, testing and proving it till it goes right. Till all of it goes right.

Consider the story as a dance, the reader and writer as partners. The writer leads, yes; but leading isn't pushing; it's setting up a field of mutuality where two people can move in cooperation with grace. It takes two to tango.

Fiction, like all art, takes place in a space that is the maker's loving difference from the thing made. Without that space there can be no consistent truthfulness and no true respect for the human beings the story is about.

Though the author may pretend otherwise, the author's point of view is larger than the character's and includes knowledge the character lacks. This means that the character, existing only in the author's knowledge, may be known as we cannot ever know any actual person; and such insight may reveal insights and durable truths relevant to our own lies.

To fuse author and character - to limit the character's behavior to what the author approves of doing, or the character's opinions to the author's opinions, and so forth - is to lose that chance of revelation.

The author's tone may be cold or passionately concerned; it may be detached or judgmental; the difference of the author's point of view from the character's may be obvious or concealed; but the difference must exist. In the space provided by that difference, discovery, change, learning, action, tragedy, fulfillment take place - the story takes place.

his imagination has no ethical ballast at all

Many older people, by choice or perforce, have no contact with children at all

Some of the most praised recent memoirs have been about growing up in poverty [...] The ground of our experience is dark, and all our inventions start in that darkness. From it, some of them leap forth in fire.

The imagination can transfigure the dark matter of life. And in many personal essays and autobiographies, that's what I begin to miss, to crave: transfiguration. To recognise our shared, familiar misery is not enough. I want to recognise something I never saw before. I want the vision to leap out at me, terrible and blazing - the fire of the transfiguring imagination. I want the true dragons.

[...] I hope every writer has had at least a moment when they rode the wave, and all the words were right.

As readers, we have all ridden that wave, and known that joy.

Prose and poetry - all art, music, dance - rise from and move with the profound rhyhtms of our body, our being, and hte body and being of the world. [...] Once we get the beat, teh right beat, our ideas and our words dance to it, the round dance that everybody can join. And then I am thou, and the barriers are down. For a little while.

When I was young, I used to know that I had a story to write when I found in my mind and body an imaginary person whom I could embody myself in, with whom I could identify strongly, deeply, bodily. It was so much like falling in love that maybe that's what it was.