[Suggestions, observations, and advice, writing as Ben Leiter]
I’ve always liked Amy Tan ever since I stumbled on her Joy Luck Club years ago.
Amy said, about her writing, “In real life, I had hundreds of moments of self-doubt. I deleted hundreds of pages from my computer’s memory.”
“As a beginning writer, I was still trying to figure out what qualified as a proper short story versus a prose poem, an anecdote, a character piece, a novella. I actually thought there were agreed-upon answers to questions like these: What is voice? What is story? How should characters develop?”
“ . . . the prose I like is such that everything is there for a reason — every word, every image, every bit of dialogue is needed . . . ”
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Ben Leiter 