If you plan out too much, you can end up injecting characters into a preordained plot and you get what a friend of mine calls Lipton-Cup-a-Story. If you plan out too little, you can end up writing a lot of pretty sentences about mountains and sunsets that don't go anywhere. This is a tension that any writer faces-between planning out too little and planning out too much. My next novel I've mapped out a little more, but even that's a very tentative mapping out, and I want to make sure that I allow myself to veer from the path I've staked out for myself. Now there is a college reunion in the novel, but it comes twenty years and nearly three hundred pages into the book. In the case of Matrimony, I started with a college reunion because that was where I thought the book began. I always start with what I believe is the beginning-it's important to me to be writing forward-even if it turns out that I'm grossly mistaken. I believe it was Mary McCarthy who said that she writes in order to find out what will happen, and I'm that way myself. He directs the MFA program in Fiction Writing at Brooklyn College. His short stories have been published widely, cited for distinction in Best American Short Stories, and broadcast on NPR's "Selected Shorts." His reviews and essays have appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, and the San Francisco Chronicle. Joshua Henkin is the author of the novels Swimming Across the Hudson, a Los Angeles Times Notable Book Matrimony, a New York Times Notable Book and The World Without You, which was named an Editors' Choice Book by The New York Times and The Chicago Tribune and was the winner of the 2012 Edward Lewis Wallant Award for Jewish American Fiction and a finalist for the 2012 National Jewish Book Award.
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