All sixteen pages of this quarterly newsletter are packed full of useful techniques, informed perspectives, and inspired nudges. In Writers Ask Issue 44, you'll hear from dozens of accomplished writers and writing teachers on these topics: Early Roots; Structure, Pacing, and Scale; Beginnings; Writing Programs. You'll also get a special Last Page Focus by Ron Carlson: Writing Flash Fiction.

I always read my books aloud when I’m finished, and it’s always torture. But there are things you catch when you hear it that you just can’t see when reading.—Ann Patchett, interviewed by Sarah Anne Johnson

I’m a psychologically driven writer. I want to get inside a person’s head and walk around in there. Family’s going to come into it one way or another.—Myla Goldberg, interviewed by Sarah Anne Johnson

These sessions taught me about the spontaneity, the organic structure, and the emotion that is involved in storytelling. Today I see the short story not primarily as an intellectual endeavor, but as a cultural artifact tightly bound with ah necessary narrative structure.
—Tim Gautreaux, interviewed by Jennifer Levasseur and Kevin Rabalais

These moments don’t seem to become the beginnings of the stories, necessarily—I work both forward and back from them—but they are the seeds from which the stories spring.
—Carrie Brown, interviewed by Jennifer Levasseur and Kevin Rabalais

Something I think about all the time is that what life does to us is to bring us—either through our own actions or through the circumstances that are somehow given to us—to these moments where we step into a position that we at some point saw another person in.
—Lee Martin