Happy Frank O’Connor Birthday

“I don’t give a hoot what the writing’s like, I write any sort of rubbish which will cover the main outlines of the story, then I can begin to see it. When I write, when I draft a story, I never think of writing nice sentences about, “It was a nice August evening when Elizabeth Jane Moriarty was coming down the road.” I just write roughly what happened, and then I’m able to see what the construction looks like. It’s the design of the story that to me is most important, the thing that tells you there’s a bad gap in the narrative here and you really ought to fill that up in some way or another. I’m always looking at the design of a story, not the treatment.” — From an interview with the Paris Review