Quotes by John Dalton

I spent several years acquiring the obsessive, day-to-day discipline that's needed if you want to write professionally, then several more, highly valuable years studying fiction writing at the University of Iowa.

I wrote some three hundred pages, threw most of them out, and started over. The novel seemed to require a maturity and breadth of vision I didn't yet have. What I discovered was that this maturity and vision accrues gradually over the course of many days, months, years of struggling to be a better writer.

Like many beginning writers, I had to make the difficult leap from short stories to learning the craft and form of a novel.

This paper will no doubt be found interesting by those who take an interest in it.