Fiction writing is an act of imagination, lived experience is secondary in many ways, writing a novel really is all about inventing worlds and people.

My book has a pre - civil rights setting with a post - civil rights sensibility. I believe less and less that there is something called "The Black Experience," though undoubtedly there was one once.

Half of what's wrong with people today is that they ain't got no place to go that makes them peaceful.

You have to find a way of shutting the future out and focusing on the writing. One of the problems I'll have with writing my second book is getting back into a situation where I think about the words on the page rather than the publishing industry, or success, or any kind of readership I may now have. I'll have to do what writers do, which is focus on the story and nothing else.

I think of my success as a kind of fluke. How else could I possibly think of it? And although it's a banal thing to say, I wrote my book because I was writing my book. At first I didn't know I was writing it, and one of the amazing things that happened as I was putting sentences down on paper is that some of the things that are most sacred and important to me rose to the surface of the prose.

One thing I am learning is to slow down. Multitasking is great, but I when try to do everything at warp speed I just end up with typos and stress.

I think that if you just write your characters you end up with something that people can access.