Regret doesn't budge things; it seems crazy that the force of all that human want can't amend a moment, can't even stir a pebble.
My knowledge of trains - and love before first sight, love at negative-one sight - comes from Alfred Hitchcock.
Perhaps it's because a writer lives in Brooklyn that he'd want to get away from it. It can be very sustaining, this community of writers - sometimes it's the feeling of many hands giving you a boost. But all that identical ambition can be choking, too. The many hands slide up to your throat.
I have twin six-year-old boys. Have no mojo. The closest thing to a mojo I have is five minutes of peace.
For the fiction students I teach, one of the most common mistakes is to start in the wrong place. Often the actual story doesn't begin until about a third of the way into their narratives. They start off instead with excessive scene-setting, metaphysical speculation, introducing nonessential dramatis personae, throat-clearing, etc.
Like all writing rules, the injunction to start with the trouble can be broken, and it should be sometimes - if there's good reason.
The main thing is to think strategically about what will engage your readers. Trust me when I tell you that few people are eager to read a story whose opening lines sound like a dissertation on giant bugs.
My wife and I live in Brooklyn, N.Y., not too far from where my Long Island childhood happened.
I went to Aspen right after school and got a freelance gig writing articles for the 'Aspen Times.' I was their nightlife correspondent. They paid me fifty bucks an article.
I delivered Chinese food on Long island, which is pretty depressing. I lived with my parents and did that for six months. I got a job a few towns over from mine so I wouldn't have to see people from my high school.
I thought, 'I'll come back to New York. I worked for the 'Aspen Times' when I lived in Aspen. I'll work for the 'New York Times' when I live in New York.' It didn't work out that way.
I got a job writing for a financial technology newsletter in Manhattan. I didn't even understand what I was writing about. The newsletter had, like, 2,000 subscribers, and it was $700 a year for a subscription.
Faith is a private issue. At least, I consider it to be one.
I consider myself a Jewish writer - even if my characters frequently are not Jewish - in the same way, I guess, that I consider myself a Jewish man, even though I don't often attend shul.
My prayer is improvised - though like some standard jazz performance, the improv happens within pretty strict parameters - and asks for nothing.
Now, whether my not asking for good things to happen to me is subconsciously intended to win me brownie points with God is something I can't answer. But I do feel the need to give thanks and also not to feel hypocritical by asking for things when I have doubts that God would answer me.
Not to be too 'Tale of Two Cities' about it, but I find writing a memoir easier than writing fiction, and more difficult.
What makes writing a memoir difficult is harder to quantify. Is it learning to know when you're ready to talk about something? Is it seeing the structure in a lumpen mass of fact? Is it finding out what you were really like as other people saw you? Yes to each.
I'm very strict in my belief that non-fiction should be truthful, and fiction is for invented narratives.
I spent three and a half years writing the novel 'Chang & Eng,' about the conjoined brothers for whom the term 'Siamese twins' was contrived, and when I think of these afflicted people, my only emotion is one of profound sympathy.
