When you watch yourself lie.

What creates the chronology of a story?

Which risk is most overlooked?

When you tell stories about your home, the stranger hears a travel narrative.

Here we have the rise, machinations, and collapse of a kingdom.

First drafts are murders of passion; second drafts wash the scene before the police arrive.

Here are the convenient, pacifying, comfortable fictions.

The new resident, the vacationer, the lost protagonist—all possibilities for further intrigue and ambiguity and chaos, the fruit of novels.

Why should your sentences end with a punch?

Please never write about what you know.

Just because something is made up doesn’t mean it’s not true.

What’s known and what’s unknown: how you are judged.

More calm during the action; more action during the calm.

How to explain all that failed ambition?

Why don’t readers exist?

How does a poor ending slam shut a reader’s journey?

You’re the prisoner: the artist decided long ago how you’ll be dragged through the work.

Passing beyond what’s comfortable and known, whether that means barriers or borders or walls.

How does Alice Munro conceal the propulsion of her stories?

How does time assist the storyteller?