Patrick Ryan

William Styron once said to a group of us that if you truly want to write, you have to set up your life so that you can write. Meaning, do what you have to do to create a life that facilitates writing—even if that’s only for an hour a day.

Paul Monette, in failing health and not long before he died, told me to keep writing because the good stuff would come to the surface. That was such a simple and wonderful idea to plant in my head as I wrote story after story and novel after novel, one unpublished manuscript after another.

Patrick Ryan