My old college writing teacher John Hersey once said, on our last day in class actually, he said to us, “Just remember the world doesn’t need any new writers.” Which at first seemed like an offputting thing to say, but his point was it’s not enough simply to be good at it, even though very few people are good at it. You have to bring something to it that it has not seen or heard before. Reading 200 short stories a week will bring that idea home to you for sure. It’s not enough to write well. You have to write originally.
Jonathan Dee interviewed in The Millions
(maybe I should have quoted the whole article, at this rate. it's a long interview, though.)














