From personal experience, I completely agree that it is often easier to go for monotone sadness. When I was starting out, I wrote a gazillion short stories that ran the gamut of human suffering - drug addiction, child abuse, terminal illness, loved ones dying by all manner of misfortune, etc. In hindsight, it's clear that I mistook the power of the situation for the power of the story.

Work isn't meaningful just because you spend your life doing it.

My work often begins as little internal dares, wondering if I can pull something off. So I spent a few years drawing these stories together, trying to build a Pangea of what began as separate continents.

You are a coward,' she said, and with that one word wrote a denunciation, a biography, and a prophecy.

Invader and invaded held on to their fistfuls of earth, but in the end, the earth outlived the hands that held it.

She wanted to hold foreign syllables like mints on her tongue until they dissolved into fluency.

Anytime I can get either of them really laughing, I immediately pull out a pad of paper write the joke down, regardless of where we are or what we're doing. I must be absolutely insufferable.