Learning to write publishable material is essentially a social process. It’s like learning to say, ‘Oh not so bad, not so bad,’ when someone asks you how you are, rather than actually telling them anything.
“Fiction is meant to illuminate, to explode, to refresh. I don’t think there’s any consecutive moral philosophy in fiction beyond excellence. Acuteness of feeling and velocity have always seemed to me terribly important. People look for morals in fiction because there has always been a confusion between fiction and philosophy.”
John Cheever