Writing is a strange marriage, and I say strange, I mean not always friendly, between story, the thing that happens, that we’re trying to narrate and language, the specificity of the words that we choose to tell that thing that happened. We’ve all read tremendous books where the writing was so gorgeous, Jane Smiley is one of them that you want to weep. We’ve also read wonderful books where the writing was exquisite but when you’re done you’re left cold and comfortless.
By the same manner I think everyone’s experienced a book that was maybe badly written, I mean, there were sometimes when you almost winced if you’re a word person, but you couldn’t put it down, because the story was so compelling.
And so when great writing comes together with those two things, when you have fabulous writing and a story that just grabs you by the throat and won’t let go, that’s when we come up with things like we have Dostoevsky and we have all these fantastic writers. I mean, whether it’s Tennessee Williams or it’s Dorothy Parker or people who knew … all very different … Hemingway, who knew how to turn a phrase, but they also knew what story was.