Link on writing

At Maud Newton's blog, Stephany Aulenback interviews Kelly Link. Link's interviews are always interesting and this one is great, filled with lots of details about her writing life.

Writing is a conversation. (I’ll probably say this again at some point.) I need to be reading in order to be writing. This year I’ve typed out a couple of stories by other writers, partly for work-related reasons, but also so that I could get a closer look at how other writers put sentences together. How they structure a plot. I was typing out stories by writers who write very differently from me, and I loved doing this. I’d never looked at other people’s work so closely, or had so much admiration for how a sentence or a paragraph or a scene is constructed. It was a way to slow down my reading speed, and I also found that after I’d been typing out someone else’s story, it felt as if there was less of a barrier when I sat down to do my own work.

Everything the woman does, from her short story collections to her editing work to Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet are great. If you haven't gotten into this stuff, you should.