SOURCE: Smith, Joan and Tobias Wolff. “Speaking into the Unknown.” Salon.com, http://archive.salon.com/dec96/interview961216.html (December 1996).

In the following interview, Wolff discusses short fiction as a genre and also describes his approach to writing a short story.

Short stories, like poems, demand a lot from their readers. Novels may be longer, but they don't require the same compressed attention. They allow moments of relaxation; their narratives promise to hold you, however casual the concentration you invest.

But Tobias Wolff, who is one of our great contemporary masters of the short story, says that the difficulty of the short story is its own reward. “The reader really has to step up to the plate and read a short story,” he once said. And the writer's thrill is “working a miracle, making life where there was none” in the space of a few precisely and elegantly...