'In her 1996 essay 'The Art of the Dumb Question', Helen Garner recalls bragging to friend Tim Winton that she had written a 200-word 'syntactically perfect sentence'. 'He scorched me with a surfer’s stare,' she writes, 'and said, ‘I couldn’t care less about that sort of shit’.' It’s an illuminating anecdote about the different approaches taken by two of our great writers.' (Introduction)