“For me, almost everything starts off as a short story,” the novelist and short story writer Joe Meno says in the June 30th issue of One Story magazine.  “All of my novels have been built around material that’s been explored or published as short stories, because it forces me to get to the character and action quickly, and helps me figure out what the story is actually about. I usually write a few short stories and realize that they feature similar questions or characters and decide that there’s a novel there somewhere.”

Meno adds, “To write one good short story, you’re probably going to write about nine bad ones. You have to enjoy the mistakes and failures and misfires and realize writing is all about one thing: trial and error.”