Guilt is glorious when it's well earned.

I'm always telling my students, don't - don't worry so much third person, first person. It doesn't make that much difference.

"Someone": I understood that this was a character who in her own life her voice hadn't much been heard and in literature her life isn't much heard. For me, it was resisting all the more appealing characters and listening to the voice that hadn't been much heard from.

As a writer, I'm too busy and worried to experience the delight while composing my own work, although, of course, I hope a reader will find something of it when the work is complete. But I do try to figure out where in their experiences certain characters of mine, who are not necessarily readers, and certainly not writers or artists, find an equivalent sensation: of delight, of astonishment, of whatever it is that briefly - and brevity seems essential - reassures us, connects us, sends a shiver of inarticulate recognition down our spines: Oh, yes: life.

Guilt is glorious when it's well earned.

Language is the writer's only tool - we really don't have anything else - but our language contains within it our entire experience of the world.

I'd like to be better at short, snappy answers.