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

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

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.

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.

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

I think that inevitably, the trouble our characters go through is a kind of metaphor for what's happening in ourselves.

I began to see, again and again, stories that were first confusing and second where the emotional impact was muted because the big scene came before the explanation of what was going on. There was a reverse chronological order as well as a concealment of what exactly was going on. I think often that comes out of the fear of being boring, and sometimes I think it's just an attempt to seem clever.