1.
I have never read a book on the โcraftโ of fiction.
2.
Thatโs a lie: I taught one last year. His discussion of dialogue was so inane I stopped reading. Based on one chapter.
3.
This makes me a lazy reader.
4.
Craft is stolen.
5.
I am a thief.
6.
I am rarely a lazy reader.
7.
I did not know how to write dialogue until I began teaching at my current place of employment.
8.
I taught creative writing workshops for years before getting this job.
9.
How did I not know how to write dialogue?
10.
Itโs 78 degrees and I am wearing a sweater.
11.
Teaching forces me to learn all these elements of craft that Iโd only intuited before.
12.
Often: wrongly.
13.
I published four books and one anthology before I began working at my current place of employment.
14.
I am a better teacher for it.
15.
I am a more conservative writer now.
16.
Lying is essential to being a writer.
17.
Have you ever met an honest writer?
18.
Honesty is fiction. Good fiction at least.
19.
Lying is inherent to fiction.
20.
I am contradicting myself.
21.
I went from writing magic (before teaching) to domestic realism (currently teaching).
22.
Is this a bad thing?
23.
Obviously.
24.
No one wants to publish my well-crafted domestic realism.
25.
Is it over? Never!
26.
One journal said that when I start writing magic again, please re-submit.
27.
And then another journal said the same thing.
28.
Talking to Kate Bernheimer, we thought maybe this was a gender thing.
29.
Men can write whatever. Women are constrained.
30.
Not in a hip OuLiPian way.
31.
Fuck that.
32.
Thirty-two suddenly feels old and aesthetically conservative, but really, my syntax is wild, maybe because I suddenly understand the rules. And so I play. I play at thirty-two. I live in a fairy tale, a fantasy, a fiction.