Short pieces I have, on rare occasions, agreed to publish — usually because someone in an editorial chair was very polite about it.
A sentence does not, in my experience, want to be written. It wants to remain a feeling, vaguely warm, somewhere behind the sternum. The labour is in the persuading.
Continue, if you must. →I have, in three of five novels, used the North Sea as a kind of moral weather. The North Sea is owed, at minimum, a postcard.
Continue, if you must. →A working theory: the photograph of an author at a kitchen table is never, in fact, a photograph of the author. It is a photograph of the table.
Continue, if you must. →Mr Penn has, on three separate occasions, sat on a paragraph until I removed it. The published novel is, in this sense, partly his.
Continue, if you must. →