The Short Form Interviews

The magical is sometimes the only way of looking at things that are hard to articulate.

A zombie story will end one of two ways, and my hope was to make the reader forget that there were only those two ways it could end.

I thought about the stories in terms of beats, and images, and how one story fades into the next, from the first page to the last.

It would be worth it to teach the [comedic theory] class again just to hear students argue whether or not rape jokes can ever be funny.

Once I attended a Q&A with Stephen King and someone asked him: What scares you? He said, Everything scares me.

I started writing in 1999 and it was a long trek. I wasted a lot of paper.

“The Oscars boobs song doesn't reengage me with the problem of being a woman in the arts so much as it makes me just change the channel.”

What’s great about reading a collection start to finish is the accretion of deeper meaning that arises when the stories in a collection start to talk to each other.

If the important thing in the story is that the reader finds her attractive, then you let the reader decide in what way she is attractive.

What I’ve learned from the first book is that it’s also a privilege to write for yourself.

The funny thing is, the sex I write about and the sex depicted in “Girls” is never meaningless.

What's the point of writing something just to make someone identify with you?

The truth is that we are conglomerations of the number of fictions that sustain us from moment to moment.

Who gives a shit about the winners?

When a Western author writes, he doesn’t lose sleep over whether his work would be intelligible outside the boundaries of Europe.

I appreciate the integration of video and interactive maps into storytelling, but what an unexhaustible technology we have in the sentence.

Lately all of Clarice Lispector’s narrators have been killing me.

The mystery and tension is created in the stories by only allowing a reader to know what the character knows and nothing more.

As much as we rant about shrinking attention span, we still crave immersion. Even TV series have been arcing, more and more, toward the epic.

I'm still working off the instructions given to me at fifteen by my seventeen year old fiction editor, who simply said, “The one rule is something's got to happen.”

That a writer can go through all the necessary stages of discovery, change, and even, to some extent, resolution, in so tight a space is daunting and miraculous.

You have five senses, but you shouldn’t turn on all of them at once. Good short story writers know when to put on the blinders.

A short story offers a stark contrast to our baggy and meaningless lives which ramble on.

In a short story, there is a world and a history to the characters that a reader must imagine, must create and, in a way, write for themselves.

You tell people ‘Yes, I did translate this into English from my native Indian language’ because you don’t want to disappoint them.

I love the power of the form, how so much can be expressed in so small a space. 

I’m not sure what most writers’ goals are when writing long fiction – to make money, apparently, and avoid expressing anything original or interesting.

If short stories are overlooked by book-buyers in favor of novelists, it's because the marketing for short stories is less aggressive. 

You can experience an entire world in a short story that takes you fifteen minutes to read. Pretty great.