Sometimes indirect style and varying chronology is great, but quite often I've seen it be just something that gets in the way. It turns out when I talk to the writer that she or he, and more often it's a woman, that she's worried.

Certainly children are being encouraged far more than they were seventy-five years ago and are more accepted as they are.

Anyone with an imagination can write about the day-to-day experiences of someone he or she is not.

When an editor first explained to me the difference between direct and indirect writing, I just thought it was a stylistic choice.

Telling someone to be confident in the abstract is not going to make it easier for the unconfident writer to actually get herself or himself to the point of being able to put in the upsetting stuff.

Every once in a while someone says, 'You can't really learn anything, if you're really a writer then you wouldn't need to do it.' But I think what people need is the sense of not being alone. They go to MFA programs to be part of a community of people who care, and then you start caring about your friend who is trying to edit a magazine and your other friend who is stuck in the middle of her poem. There you have all kinds of things to worry about besides your own success.

It's a scary thing for fiction writers, when you're always writing from the point of view both as and for someone who is different.