How to write a book. A memoir of the craft (№ 465477)

Stories and novels are not souvenir T-shirts or wooden football players. These are relics, remnants of an undiscovered pre-existing world. The writer’s job is to use the tools in his toolbox to get them out of the ground, damaging them as little as possible. Sometimes the fossil is small, just a shell. Sometimes huge, a Tyrannosaurus rex with all its giant ribs and bared teeth. In any case - a short story or a thousand-page novel - the excavation technique is essentially the same.