Greetings, writers—
What if you held on so tightly to your discerning, critical eye that you just couldn’t mellow, not for one single second, even if it would save your life?
That’s a question posed by Tobias Wolff’s brilliant Bullet in the Brain1, which is a wonderfully teachable story for reasons both profound (it slows down time in a gorgeous, truly moving way) and practical (you can easily read it online).
In it, a book critic—who judges language as involuntarily as the rest of us breathe—finds himself in the middle of an armed robbery at a bank.
But is the story about crime, or about writing? About, even, the power of a single verb?
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