Everything I say here is of course one writer’s opinion–opinion grounded in years of writing, reading, teaching, editing, and arguing with my writer friends, but still only opinion, since art does not afford the testable certainties of geometry or physics. For that reason some of what I say will undoubtedly be, for some readers, off the mark or even offensive.…but I’m assuming, as the primary reader of this book, an intensely serious beginning novelist who wants the strict truth (as I perceive it) for his life’s sake, so that he can plan his days and years in ways beneficial to his art; avoid false paths of technique, theory, and attitude; and become as quickly and efficiently as possible a master of his craft.

The whole world seems to conspire against the young [or old] novelist….friends, relatives, and professional writers, are quick to point out the terrible odds (thereby increasing them) against anyone’s (ever, anywhere) becoming a successful writer. "Writing takes a rare and special gift," they say (not strictly true); "The market for writing gets worse every year" (largely false); or, "You’ll starve!" (maybe so). And the discouragement offered by other human beings is the least of it. Writing a novel takes an immense amount of time, at least for most people, and can test the writer’s psyche beyond endurance. The writer asks himself day after day, year after year, if he’s fooling himself, asks why people write novels anyhow–long, careful studies of the hopes, joys, and disasters of creatures who, strictly speaking, do not exist. The writer may be undermined by creeping misanthropy, while the writer’s wife, or husband, is growing sulky and embarrassed. The idiots who write for TV pull in money by the fistful, while this saint among mortals, the novelist, pumps gas, types memos, or sells life insurance to keep food in the mouths of his children....Almost no one mentions that for a certain kind of person, nothing is more joyful or satisfying than the life of a novelist, if not for its financial rewards then for others; that one need not turn into a misanthrope or a drunk; that in fact one can be a more or less successful M.D., engineer, or forest ranger, even follow the unfashionable profession of housewife, and also be a novelist–at any rate, many novelists, both great and ordinary, have done it….More people fail at becoming successful businessmen than fail at becoming artists.

Once when I was driving through Colorado with a friend, traveling down a narrow mountain pass, we came upon an accident. A pickup truck and a car had collided, and from fifty feet away we could see the blood. We pulled over and ran to help. All the time I was running, all the time I was trying, with my friend’s help, to pry open the door of the car in which a nine-months-pregnant woman had been impaled through the abdomen, I was thinking: I must remember this! I must remember my feelings! How would I describe this?...For better or worse, the practice of fiction changes a person.