This is a short book because most books about writing are filled with bullshit.
Money talks, bullshit walks.
I am, when you stop to think of it, a member of a fairly select group: the final handful of American novelists who learned to read and write before they learned to eat a daily helping of video bullshit.
The idea that America exists in a culture of violence is bullshit. What America exists in is a culture of Kardashian.
Most books about writing are filled with bullshit. Fiction writers, present company included, don’t understand very much about what they do—not why it works when it’s good, not why it doesn’t when it’s bad.