I find that I get very excited about what my students are up to and that I get to be the hurdle they need to jump over.

There's the belief that we can't be smart enough to write. And certainly censorship of women, too.

I've been astonished how often, when I convince a writer to tell a story more straightforwardly and to tell it more simply and directly, it turns out that this author is great and the story is wonderful.

Somehow we have to detach from feeling as though money is a quick and easy standard by which we can gauge how well we're doing.

Even murderers, I suppose, experience the loss of car keys the way the rest of us do. I mean, how can they not? Once you make this person scramble around the house looking for her car keys and finally find them, get in the car, and run into traffic, we can identify with her enough that when she stops the car and pulls the gun out of her purse and heads in to kill somebody, we'll be with her as much as is possible.

Being part of a community of writers is huge. I really think that's why people go to MFA programs.

Sometimes people want to know how to write a story from the point of view of a murderer and make her sympathetic. I think the answer is that you start by having her look for her car keys, because everybody knows what it's like.