NEW YORK — Amy Hempel, short-story writer, is spending a rainy morning at a Madison Avenue diner.

She is 55 years old. Her flowing hair is silvery-white. Her speech is clear, careful. She sometimes edits herself as she talks or advances her thoughts as if placing one foot slowly before the other.

For more than 20 years, she has been creating short stories. She takes her time, writing out sentences in longhand, revising constantly in her head, scrubbing out excess like smudges on a mirror. "I'm not on deadline," she jokes.

Her total work barely covers 400 pages, but the reward, beyond its completion, has been admiration from critics and writers and a growing audience. Her "Collected Stories" (Scribner, $27.50) came out a year ago and has sold well enough — there have been nine printings, 36,000 copies in all — that a paperback has been pushed back from this spring until at least the fall.

"Publishing her collected stories has made such a difference," says Hempel's editor, Nan Graham, editor-in-chief of Scribner. "She never sold more than 10,000 copies of a book before. Having 36,000 in print may seem pretty modest, but it's actually pretty amazing for an author of literary short stories."

Life in a Hempel story can seem as stark as a Hempel sentence. She writes of accidents, death, broken marriages, lives where dogs are the most trusted companions, the kinds of stories that make you wonder how the narrators lived to tell them.

"Nothing interests me more than finding out how someone got through something, usually a big, hard thing, but sometimes a small awkward thing," says Hempel, who lives near the diner, on Manhattan's Upper East Side.

Hempel's career has been a long process of recovery and self-discovery. Some people are born writers; others, such as Hempel, were driven to it. For Hempel, writing is the expression and collection of a life she once feared was coming apart.

One of three siblings, she was born in Chicago and grew up in Denver and the San Francisco Bay Area. Her father was a business executive. Her mother, who worked occasionally as a guide in art museums, kept the house filled with books.

"The way I got my mother's attention when I was a kid was by putting words together in an interesting way, or a funny way — what she found amusing," Hempel says. "Since (her attention) was what I wanted more than anything, and as kid was very hard to get, that's what I did."

Hempel didn't plan to be an author, but instead studied journalism and pre-med "until I hit chemistry." Life drove her to the page. When Hempel turned 19, her mother killed herself and within a year her mother's sister did the same. In her 20s, Hempel was in two bad auto accidents, later writing in the story "The Harvest" that she "moved through days like a severed head that finishes a sentence."

Her luck changed after she moved to New York and sought out the Columbia University writing workshop taught by Gordon Lish, a former editor at Esquire and Alfred A. Knopf known for mentoring such authors as Raymond Carver and Richard Ford.

"She was shy and she was nervous and she blushed a great deal," Lish recalls. "She was desperate, desperate in every respect a human being could be — desperate, grappling, struggling, striving to get a hold on her experience."

Lish believes that writers succeed because of will: You become a great writer by wanting to be one. Drive, will, character, "all of which Amy has," Lish says. Hempel remembers how hard it first was, how she wondered if she should even be writing.

"And then I think of a sentence I really like," she says.

"Emily Dickinson once said that when a poem works, it felt like the top of her head was coming off. My own personal way — wait that's three words for one word," Hempel says, stopping, correcting herself. "My way of knowing the sentence just really lands is if I get a little bit teary."