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jobs to give my characters,” says Nina.
    “Because it’s the last thing we think of. When creating a character, we usually start with the soul and then work outward from there. But it’s a lot smarter to start with what the guy does for a living. There’s a reason McTeague was a dentist. In Ann Petry’s Country Place , the town stud runs the filling station.”
    “You said that we know what has happened in a short story before it begins,” says Ana. “Then how do we know where to begin our story?”
    “It grows out of the understanding of your characters you’ve already developed. You begin your story knowing everything about your people except what is going to happen to them.”
    When they read “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” they will see that it begins one afternoon, when something is about to happen to the despairing Seymour Glass. But they will also see that this beginning comes at a moment of impasse. It is the beginning of an inevitable end. After reading a novel, we often wonder what happens to the characters after the final page. We can imagine Pip’s future, or Mrs. Verlock’s, or Count Vronsky’s. That rarely happens with short stories. In a way, they begin with an announcement of the end. After the last page of a short story, there is no more Seymour Glass, and no more Maria either.
    “So in effect you begin a short story by saying, ‘We’ve come to this,’ ” says Ana.
    “I wish I had said that.”
    “You will,” says Kristie.
    “I have a very hard time figuring out what to write,” says Jasmine.
    “Some days I simply cannot write,” says Inur. “I can spend weeks clearing my throat.”
    “You ought to write every day if you can, even if it’s a single sentence. But you can’t force it. And you can’t force subject matter. On the other hand, you can be proactive and find ways to allow your mind to be receptive to whatever may come its way.” I tell them about Friedrich Schiller, who used to fill a dresser drawer with rotten apples, and begin his writing day by breathing in the fumes.
    “ Mrs . Schiller must have loved that,” says Suzanne.
    “The trick for a lot of writers is to create a state of mind where you are not thinking about writing. Rather create a state of reverie, a dream state. Dreams are where other people escape from reality. But for the writer, dreams are reality.”
    “What do you do to achieve that dream state?” Sven asks.
    “Take a walk. That’s what Dante and Nietzsche did—they wrote on long walks. Wallace Stevens, on the other hand, dictated his poems to his secretary at the Hartford Insurance Company, where he worked.”
    “Do you use any rituals,” Kristie asks me, “when you prepare to write?”
    “Nothing elaborate. I start the morning with coffee, toast, and orange juice. Then usually, a bowl of Special K, with slices of banana or not. Finally, a shot of heroin, and I’m off.”
    “What if we’re out of heroin?” asks Diana.
    “Paddle about in a kayak. Ride a bike. Create a situation in which you look outside yourself. Something inside yourself will come to you.”
    “I find that’s true,” says Robert. “But the something that comes to me is freakish.”
    I agree with him. “But you may find that what started out as freakish eventually shows itself to be part of something universal. That often comes later in the piece, after you’ve started writing.” It all comes down to that difference between invention and imagination. John Irving is a master of invention, but very little in his work displays a larger imagination. Imagination ties the freakish, as Robert calls it, to the eternal. “As writers you have to remind yourself that people are always strange. They don’t need to have three nipples, or four ears, or be able to swallow the ocean in one gulp to be strange. And the great moment in writing something is when you realize that the wonderful, unheard-of event you just made up is part of the wonderful, heard-of event of