A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: From the Man Booker Prize-winning, New York Times-bestselling author of Lincoln in the Bardo

We’ll find our voice and ethos and distinguish ourselves from all the other writers in the world without needing to make any big overarching decisions, just by the thousands of small ones we make as we revise.

Consider this sentence, which I’ll infuse with increasing specification: Some guy is sitting in a random room thinking nothing at all and this other guy walks in. An angry racist is sitting in a room, thinking of how unfairly he’s been treated all his life, and a person of another race walks in. An angry white racist named Mel, who has cancer, is s

The boldness of this leap teaches us something important about the short story: it is not a documentary or rigorous accounting of the passage of time or a fair-minded attempt to show life as it is really lived; it’s a radically shaped, even somewhat cartoonish (when held up against the tedious real world) little machine that thrills us with the ext

That’s how I see revision: a chance for the writer’s intuition to assert itself over and over.

And who had need of his globes here?

A specific description, like a prop in a play, helps us believe more fully in that which is entirely invented.

nothing exists in a story by chance or merely to serve some documentary function. Every element should be a little poem, freighted with subtle meaning that is in connection with the story’s purpose.

(All coherent intellectual work begins with a genuine reaction.)

This Hanov, a man of about forty, with a worn face and a lifeless expression, was beginning to age noticeably, but was still handsome and attractive to women.