Advice from Tobias Wolff

[Those moments of surprise that occur when you're writing, ] that's what I live for. They sustain me even if I don't have very many of them. I live with the expectation that I will have more, the faith that I will have more. What I could predict I will do when I sit down to write is not what I want to end up with. I want to end up with what surprises me along the way, what jumps. out at me from the potential of my work and not from what I've already realized about it before I've even started. If I'm simply writing down what I already know, it is of no earthly interest to me. And not only that, everyone else will know it anyway. Simply obvious stuff. I'm not subtle. When I sit down to write, I discover things that I have, for one reason or another, not admitted, not seen, not reflected on sufficiently. And those are the things that I live for in other people's fiction as well as my own.

I know that Ray Carver's stories were submitted to the New Yorker for years before they began to publish them. And I know that some of his best stories were rejected by the New Yorker before they began to take his stories. Why? I'm not attributing corruption to them just because he got well known in the interim. I honestly think that at some point they began to like his stories, though they hadn't liked the others. But why? Where's the line that was crossed there? I don't see it. So it's a very whimsical business. You become especially aware of it as a short story writer. Novelists will characteristically work for three or four years before they have something to send out. But story writers have something to send out every few months, so they're much more aware of the caprice of response. Also, when you publish a collection of stories and the reviews start coming in, one reviewer says this is a wonderful collection and the story that's obviously the best story in here is such and such. And if only such stories as, and then he names the obviously worst one, would live up to this level ... blah‑blah‑blah. Then you get another review which names a completely different set of stories as the obviously best ones and the obviously worst ones. And you suddenly realize that what Edmond Wilson said is true‑"No two readers read the same book." In the end you have to be the arbiter of your fiction, the judge of your fiction, the harshest judge of your fiction, as you are your own best reader. Who else is there in the end that you have to please? I have an acquaintance who is a very successful novelist commercially. I happen to know that she hates her own work. She's an absolutely miserable person, a really unhappy woman. And she's defensive. She talks a lot about how much money she makes and all this. She's clearly made miserable by her feelings about her own work. I know another woman who is also very commercially successful whose stuff is crap. But she doesn't believe that her stuff is crap, and she's quite happy. If you're not pleasing yourself, you haven't pleased anybody important.

Tobias Wolff from A Piece of Work (edited by Jay Woodruff)