Paul Lisicky

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Mark, my ex, and I were once driving down East 34th Street, and I pointed out a particularly styled poodle on the sidewalk and said something like: “The poodles of my childhood were unkempt.” He replied that that was an opening line, and I might have said, “Who would care about that?” Well, I ended up using that in a story in Unbuilt Projects, but the point was that he believed you should write what you need to write, not what you think editors and agents want. Work that’s good, that’s itself, eventually gets seen. Maybe not through the expected, gatekeeper-ish channels, but trust that it gets seen.
https://www.pw.org/content/ten_questions_for_paul_lisicky