We talked about the article I was trying to write. The conversation went like this: What was wrong with the article? I asked. Well, first of all, he said, and he paused, as if perhaps he was sorry to have to say this. Well, first of all, the first sentence. I had wanted a spectacular opening. My first sentence read: “In the spring of 1971, someone went mad for blood in the Sacramento Valley.” A fellow student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop had praised that sentence. Todd didn’t like it? No, he said, it was melodramatic. Reminded of this conversation decades later, Todd said with a touch of irony, which I hadn’t heard in his voice back then: “Well, I guess I stand by that judgment.” —TK To write is to talk to strangers. You want them to trust you. You might well begin by trusting them—by imagining for the reader an intelligence at least equal to the intelligence you imagine for yourself. No doubt you know some things that the reader does not know (why else presume to write?), but it helps to grant that the reader has knowledge unavailable to you.
