In terms of “how you know,” there are various ways to think about that. I liked the meat of the story, but I didn’t think the opening note had any juice, and then I found a question that was pretty central to the story, so I started it there. But I could tell that it wasn’t that compelling. I will say that for “Peanuts Aren’t Nuts” I never liked the opening until I found a new one, so for years it had a totally different opening. I don’t know what a perfect first sentence is. I think that is helpful.īD: How important is perfecting the opening sentence of a story, and when do you know you have the sentence you want to keep?ĬZ: I don’t know about perfection. I write nonfiction as regularly as I write fiction, so there is always something to dig into. I was not exactly sure, so I took time away, not necessarily because I thought that was good for the work, though it always is, just because there was no more forward motion available, and I worked on other things, and I think for me that’s a very helpful reality, which is that I have multiple things going on at one time. I have assembled my busy life in such a way that when I get these snatches of time, I am desperate to write.Ĭertainly, in the writing of “Peanuts Aren’t Nuts,” I had multiple endings, for example.

I have two small children and a full-time job, and so I’m never at a loss for material. Of course, writing is not an easy process, and it’s not like every time I sit down the words pour out of my fingertips. What do you do when the writing does not come, when no words appear on the page? In other words, how do you manage writer’s block?Ĭourtney Zoffness: I am a little unsure about the technical definition of writer’s block, so I wonder if that refers to sitting down and wanting to write something, but not knowing what to write or knowing what you want to write but not knowing how to do that. A recipient of two residency fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, her work has appeared in The Southern Review, Indiana Review, The Rumpus, Los Angeles Review of Books, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere and was listed as “notable” in The Best American Essays 2018. Zoffness directs the Creative Writing Program at Drew University and lives in Brooklyn, New York.īrian DiNuzzo: It has been said that no writer is immune from at least some creative frustration. Her story “Peanuts Aren’t Nuts” won the 2018 Sunday Times Short Story Award, and she has won the American Literary Review Fiction Prize, the Arts & Letters Prize in Creative Nonfiction, and an Emerging Writers Fellowship from The Center for Fiction. Courtney Zoffness writes fiction and nonfiction.

Wake in the Night by Laura Krughoff