I sent The World Well Lost to one editor who rejected it on sight, and then wrote a letter to every other editor in the field warning them against the story, and urging them to reject it on sight without reading it.

I've always written very tightly, and there's a good reason for that. There's no point in using words that you're not going to apply.

The first writing I did was short short stories for a newspaper syndicate for which I was paid five dollars a piece on publication.

You don't sit up in a cave and write the Great American Novel and know it is utterly superb, and then throw it page by page into the fire. You just don't do that. You send it out. You have to send it out.

It should consist of short, sharply focused sentences, each of which is a whole scene in itself.