A Conclusion Is Simply The Place Where

A Novel Requires A Certain Kind Of World Building And Also A Certain Kind Of Closure, Ultimately. Whereas With A Short Story You Have This Sense That There Are Hinges That The Reader Doesn't See. I Would Say That All Short Stories Have Mystery Naturally Built Into Them.

I'm Certainly Very Influenced By What You Would Call 'contemporary Headline Horror,' Stuff That Is True Crime Or For One Reason Or Another Catches Our Attention In The Media, Those Strange Cases That We End Up Obsessing About. I'm Always Influenced By Weird Anecdotes And News.

The Danger In Writing About A World You Don't Know Very Well Is That You Can Get Lost In It, And Sometimes I'll End Up With A Hundred Pages I Don't Know What To Do With.

The Earliest Impetuses For Writing, For Me, Were Simply The Strange Things I Happened To Notice In My Everyday Life, Stuff I Read About In The Grocery Store Tabloids My Mom Bought, Situations That Struck Me As Compelling, Anecdotes I'd Heard, Images, Words, Metaphors.

You Can Recognize In Your Own Reading Habits What Writers Are Doing That Works And What Doesn't. I'm Becoming Much More Aware Of That After Reading A Decade Of Student Stories.