I’ve been looking through my notebooks and files. I apparently have a lot of story fragments lying around, waiting to be fleshed out properly, or to be polished. They’re my stillborn children— the corpses of stories never born into the world. Sometimes I wonder whether I really have the gift of writing. I am, for good or bad, my greatest critic. But no matter: I will still write for the love of writing, even if I criticize myself harshly, even if I feel my prose is poor. One must try and experience such things; otherwise, why live at all?

Previously: Knowledge/Schooling