I'm starting to think my narrators' sentences are getting too big for them, and they are getting to sound a bit samey and, more disturbingly, a bit too much like me.

If you can just actually let the character be for a bit, then you get the right sense.

Nothing had happened yet in my life except the need to get out of it.

When you find yourself alone, or in a transition, you dream more. These are also the times when you read books.

Story is about pulling the reader in and a plot is a more externalized mechanism of revelation. A plot is more antic, more performative, and less intimate. When you're telling a story you're telling it into someone's ear.

I can't think of anything you might say about Irish people that is absolutely true.

I do not believe in evil- I believe that we are human and fallible, that we things and spoil them in an ordinary way.