“It’s never the middle that I can’t make work. It’s never the beginning that I can’t make work. It’s always the end. Because what is the end of a story? What does that mean? What is a story? To confect some sort of plot “ending” seems very artificial to me. I’m just not interested. I used to have a friend who was a carpenter and I remember watching him make a bookcase once and there was like, it was like this sort of plank with all these other planks sticking out of it at these crazy angles, you know. And it looked like a porcupine or something and I said, “That’s a bookcase? What are you talking about? That’s not a bookcase.” And he said, “Wait a minute.” And he grabbed this other plank and he sort of smushed everything together and went wham wham wham wham wham, and it was a bookcase. (laughter) I cannot tell until the last minute of the final draft whether the thing is going to work or whether it’s just going to fall apart and it’s nothing.”
--Deborah Eisenberg, in an interview with Bomb magazine
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