You know how when you first become aware of the existence of something, you start noticing it everywhere? Like a new type of car you hadn’t paid attention to? A Chevy Volt would be a good example. Let’s say you don’t even know what they look like, having never seen one, but after your uncle buys one and bores you to death telling you all about it when you’re just trying to watch the game, the next day you see ten of them on your commute into work. You know that feeling?

Couteau: My first question concerns the process of writing. Do you have any sort of daily ritual that serves as a preparation to writing, or do you just sit down every day at a certain time and begin?

Writers' Reel is a weekly video feature.

Richard Ford, author of The Sportswriter, Independence Day, and the newly published Canada, answers questions about his writing practice.

As our final review approaches this coming Sunday, I am trying to keep my anxiety fairly neat and tidy. I am avoiding, while I lie in bed at night, imagining in shockingly vivid detail the hundreds of horrible scenarios that could happen.

How many writers does a society need? A social studies teacher once told me the answer was one. As opposed to other jobs, farming for instance, where many people are needed to supply food, only one good storyteller is needed in any society. The same ratio holds, according to this teacher, for the other creative arts.

PEN Center USA invites you to a generative writing workshop to be held June 23 in our office in Beverly Hills.

FINDING YOUR VOICE AS A WRITER

with Samantha Dunn

My mother taught me how to read when I was two. I had a few Little Golden Books that I kept on the table next to the sofa bed where we slept, but the real books lived in the hutch by the front door, including a full set of Encyclopedia Brittanica she purchased impulsively from a door-to-door salesman and grudgingly paid for from a coupon book each month.