SOURCE: “One Woman's Intriguing Mind: A Life of Writing and the Story Collections,” in Doris Betts, Twayne, 1997, pp. 37–59.

In the following essay, Evans examines the defining characteristic of Betts's fiction.

The Writing Habit

If you're going to write, Betts told a reporter in 1975, you'd better be hard on yourself. “Nobody licenses you. NOBODY pays you a salary.”¹ And Betts might well have added: Nobody makes the time available—especially for women. When her own three children were young, Betts juggled their needs with whatever writing was at hand. Asked to describe her “ideal writing day,” she replies that she has never had one. Schedules get disrupted, and even an hour saved for writing may end up a 10-minute session instead. Still, if she were to have that ideal day, “it would begin with everybody waiting on me instead of the other way around. I don't believe there's a...