But there’s a moral reason too. What my reader gets out of my pot is what she needs, and she knows her needs better than I do. My only wisdom is knowing how to make pots. Who am I to preach?

DEFINING GOOD People often email me excerpts of their work, anxiously asking, “Is this good?” And I can honestly answer I don’t know. I have no idea, and I honestly don’t care to know. I know what I like, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is what works—what’s effective. “Good” is subjective.

Learning to write comes from reading, both the work of published writers and of our peers, and from using one’s powers of insight and creativity to analyze what one reads and figure out why it works when it does and what is missing when it doesn’t. This is where knowledge is gained, and it’s slow and frustrating, nebulous, diffuse, much less direct