When a writer subjects us to a non-normative event—a physical implausibility, the use of markedly elevated language (or markedly vernacular language), or a series of lengthy digressions in a Russian pub in which the people keep freezing in midaction for several pages so that each can be described at length, in turn—he pays a price: our reading energy drops. (We get suspicious and resistant.) But if it doesn’t drop fatally, and if, later, we see that this was all part of the plan—if what seemed a failure of craft turns out to be integral to the story’s meaning (that is, it seems that he “meant to do that”)—then all is forgiven and we might even understand the profitable exploitation of that apparent excess as a form of virtuosity.

A good story is one that, having created a pattern of excesses, notices those excesses and converts them into virtues.

The exciting part of all of this, to me, is that we always have a basis on which to proceed. The reader is out there, and she’s real. She’s interested in life and, by picking up our work, has given us the benet of the doubt.

All we have to do is engage her.

To engage her, all we have to do is value her.

... there are two things that separate writers who go on to publish from those who don’t.

First, a willingness to revise.

Second, the extent to which the writer has learned to make causality.

The kind of intuitive, line-by-line attention to editing we’ve been talking about—that’s what makes it more likely that what happens in there will be thrilling and non-trivial, that whatever happens in there will happen more crisply and denitively. And since, in every decision, I’m proceeding by the question “Does this delight me?” there should be some delight for you in there too.