On Political Writing

In this mode, I found, I had stronger opinions than when I was trying to be Hemingway. If something wasn’t working, I knew what to do about it, immediately and instinctually, in the form of an impulse (“Oh, that might be cool”), whereas before I’d been rationally deciding, in stiff obeisance to what I thought a story should, or must, do. This was a

Mon ambivalence morale au sujet de la politique a toujours fait de moi l’invité neutre à bien des tables. En tant qu’écrivain, il se trouve que je suis plus curieux de comprendre les pensées et les sentiments de mes amis que je ne le suis de débattre de la pertinence de leurs prévisions politiques, de qui aurait dû gagner le collège électoral, ou d

The goal is not to keep the TICHN cart empty and thus write a “perfectly normal” story. A story that approaches its ending with nothing in its TICHN cart is going to have a hard time ending spectacularly. A good story is one that, having created a pattern of excesses, notices those excesses and converts them into virtues.