I remember I had had one woman who had three or four kids, and some of them were having problems. I said, 'Maybe you could go write somewhere else, away from your house.' And sure enough, all kinds of wonderful stuff emerged. She was keeping too much charge of herself because she couldn't stop being a mother when she was in the house. You have to find your own way of letting loose, if you're one of those people.

For some people, it's very easy to be spontaneous and they can pour out the most wonderful stuff. But it's really hard to exert control over it, to think, 'Well, this could be different. This could go in the opposite order, there could be more here and less there.' For other people, it's much easier to have rules and a methodology, but much harder to let loose and allow their feelings to come pouring out on the page. They're more shy or they're just more distant from their emotions. I think everybody starts with one or the other.

Sometimes it's interesting to see what people who have too much control need to do to write freely.

I think the difference between writing as someone and writing for them is that when you write for someone, you take on a kind of political burden or message, which I don't think we have the right to do.

We have to give our poor, innocent, and undeserving-of-our-badness characters trouble in order to make them characters in a story.

I think you have to remember that writing is hard; my first editor used to say that to me.

We still have so many cultures in which people are imprisoned and whipped and killed for writing what they think.