In his preface to Three Plays for Puritans, George Bernard Shaw extols the virtues of prefaces and berates Shakespeare for never writing one. "I would give half a dozen of Shakespear's ^{(Shaw had his own unique way of spelling things. Shaw had his own unique way of doing practically everything.)} plays for one of the prefaces he ought to have written."

Far be it from me to take sides in the famous (one-sided) fight between Shaw and Shakespeare; but I confess, I like prefaces and enjoy reading what writers have to say about their writing. One of the great formative influences in my youth was the Dangerous Visions anthology edited by Harlan Ellison. Every story in the book started with an introduction by Ellison and ended with an afterword by the author—some of them chatty, some of them evasive, some of them talking about what goes through a writer's head as he or she tries to make a story work. It was the first time I really got a sense that people sat down and wrote this stuff: real people with real lives, not godlike beings who exuded words effortlessly. In Dangerous Visions, Ellison talked about getting together with these people, shooting the breeze, or maybe just walking with them down the streets of Greenwich Village…and the authors themselves talked about rewrites, struggling with characters, inventing details, and putting them down on the page.

This was a revelation to me when I was twelve or thirteen. It made writing real; it made the writers real. I won't say it made me think I could be a writer—I'd been writing stories since kindergarten, so writing was already in my blood—but it made me think of writing in a different way. Instead of tossing off imitations of stuff you saw on television, writing could be something you thought about: something you put your heart into rather than scribbling words as fast as possible so you could show off to all your friends.