I responded affirmatively.

Writing is a matter strictly of developing oneself. You compete only with yourself. You develop yourself by writing. An editor’s goal is to help writers make the most of the patterns that are unique about them. There are people who superimpose their own patterns on the work of writers and seem to think it is their role to force things in the

The notes from one to the next frequently had little in common. They jumped from topic to topic, and only in places were sequentially narrative. So I always rolled the platen and left blank space after each item to accommodate the scissors that were fundamental to my advanced methodology. After reading and rereading the typed notes and then

Creative nonfiction is not making something up but making the most of what you have.

In the course of writing, you really find out what you don’t know, and you read in an attempt to get it right.

was “very much a thing of its time,” and its time is not today.

deceiving researcher after researcher down through the ages, all of whom will make new errors on the strength of the original errors, and so on and on into an exponential explosion of errata.”

The worst checking error is calling people dead who are not dead. In the words of Joshua Hersh, “It really annoys them.” Sara remembers a reader in a nursing home who read in The New Yorker that he was “the late” reader in the nursing home. He wrote demanding a correction. The New Yorker, in its next issue, of course complied, inadvertently

Young writers generally need a long while to assess their own variety, to learn what kinds of writers they most suitably and effectively are,