Things happened at night and
I don’t remember which of them
was real and was happening
outside my head. Someone was
trying to break in through
the back windows or the front
door. I got up in the dark
and went to my closet and pulled
my rifle out and walked down
the hallway in the dark and hoped
I didn’t shoot someone I wasn’t
supposed to shoot. I woke up with
my wife pounding her fists
against my chest and saying, No,
I won’t! No! And I grabbed
her wrists and she woke up.
“The really tricky discipline to writing is trying to play without getting overcome by insecurity or vanity or ego. Showing the reader that you’re smart or funny or talented or whatever, trying to be liked, integrity issues aside, this stuff just doesn’t have enough motivational calories in it to carry you over the long haul. You’ve got to discipline yourself to talk out of the part of you that loves the thing, loves what you’re working on. Maybe just plain loves.” — David Foster Wallace (interview with Larry McCaffery in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Summer 1993, Vol. 13.2)