Constructive criticism

…[William Faulkner] didn’t seem remote to everybody in being our great writer. I know a story about him, though he never knew anybody knew of it, I’d bet. Mississippi is full of writers, and I heard this from the person it was told to. A lady had decided she’d write a novel and got along fine till she came to the love scene. “So,” she told my friend, “I thought, there’s William Faulkner, sitting right up there in Oxford. Why not send it to William Faulkner and ask him?” So she sent it to him, and time went by, and she didn’t ever hear from him, and so she called him up. Because there he was. She said, “Mr. Faulkner, did you ever get that love scene I sent you?” He said yes, he had got it. And she said, “Well, what do you think of it?” And he said, “Well, honey, it’s not the way I’d do it—but you go right ahead.” Now, wasn’t that gentle of him?

—Eudora Welty, The Paris Review interview, Fall 1972