"When you have symbols, they are operating on different levels, and I don’t even have to know what..."

“When you have symbols, they are operating on different levels, and I don’t even have to know what the symbols mean, but I have to gravitate toward the ones that feel charged in some way… George Saunders talks about looking for words on the page that have a charge to them and following those words, and there is something where you can train your instincts where you can write a page, and the page has a flatness to it, where there’s almost nothing interesting in it, but there’s one sentence there that you as the writer keep being drawn to. That sentence is a portal, literally, into where the actual story is. And the rest of the sentences were just warmup and can just go… That’s where the work acquires depth.”

- Aimee Bender (via mttbll)