At the end of each talk I usually have a question-and-answer session, where the students ask me stuff about writing and I distract them with cheap jokes and foul language while I try to think of semi-intelligent responses. Sometimes, the students are a little shy, so I tell them to ask me any questions they have via email, instead. Here are some actual questions from students, and my actual answers:

A: There are a number of things you could try when a story stops dead in its tracks and you don’t know how to start it up again. First, you could try writing something else. Some people get blocked on a story, and then tear themselves away and write something—part of a poem, or an essay, or even part of another story—and then return to the first one, to find out that they’re not blocked anymore, that the writing is going smoothly again. Second, you could try reading—not anything that’s related to what you’re trying to write, necessarily, but just something good, something you enjoy, something that’ll get you excited about words again. (Poetry is good for this purpose.) Third, you could relax, and sleep on it. Your subconscious might work things out overnight, and when you awake, you’ll know what to do with your story. Finally, you could try watching the sky. Sometimes, and I’m not kidding here, if you look at it long enough, an idea will fall from it and into your head.

A: Don’t compromise. The first person you have to please, when you’re writing a story, is yourself. Don’t worry about anyone else for now. If your opinions and principles do differ from the majority of people around you, then you have all the more reason to express them clearly and without compromise. (And when you do write a story that you’re happy with, the chances are good that it will find its own appreciative audience).

A: There are no actual rules for keeping a story interesting, just as there are no real rules for organizing a story. All a writer has to remember is three words: make it work. You can begin in the middle of the action, and fill in what happened before through a series of flashbacks, while the action proceeds; you can start from the end and work your way backwards, to the beginning (I believe Martin Amis did that in his novel Time’s Arrow); you can even start a story in a straightforward fashion, and then use a flash-forward to show the readers how the characters end up years from now (as in Gregorio Brillantes’s amazing short story, "The Cries of Children on an April Afternoon in the Year 1957"). You have to decide which method is appropriate for the story you’re writing.

If you’re looking for a "classic" story structure, though, there is one. It’s called Freytag’s Pyramid (because it was identified by 19th-century German writer Gustav Freytag). Jerome Stern described it like this: "First, readers feel they must know who is in the story and where and when it is taking place (exposition); the plot has to get going early (rising action); once readers understand the situation, something else has to happen to keep things going (complication); and all this leads to something (climax); where things change (reversal); and as things wind down (falling action); the end is reached (catastrophe)." "One way or another, crudely or subtly," Stern says about the Pyramid, "it underlies most fiction."

A: Style is how you tell your story. It consists of all the decisions a writer makes while writing—this word instead of that word, this method instead of that, this point of view instead of another. I believe the only good way to develop it is to write a lot—the more you find yourself having to make these decisions, the more you will develop your own distinctive way of tackling stories and subjects.

One shouldn’t be too concerned about one’s style. One should just write the stories that one wants to write, and all the rest should follow (what you write about will largely determine how you write about it). The novelist Tom Robbins had this to say about style: "You can’t be too concerned, too occupied, with conforming to a style when you write. I think this is the best way to approach writing: first of all, you have to eat your technique. You can’t write technique any more than you can speak grammar. So, you develop some technique, and then you eat it. Digest it. Eliminate it so it’s a part of yourself; it’s in your blood but you’re not concerned with it anymore.

"And then all you do is, you write a sentence and see where it takes you. You take a trip on the page. You go where sentences lead you. It’s a journey."