I try to find the beauty in things. On dark days, I sit in my armchair looking at clouds and I am awed at how rain is made.

Certainly I had from an early age a sense of the power and beauty of religious texts - the awesome magnitude of the Bible stories I was reading as a child. The hymns. The sermons. I can still vividly hear the sermons and the pieces of soft piano music played after them, the preacher asking if anyone wanted to come up to the altar and accept Christ as their savior.

All of us, writers and non-writers alike, have incredible well-springs of personal experience and history. And we also have imagination - which I think is a kind of human miracle.

Even if you don't feel like sitting down to write or working on that big proposal, or whatever it is, just show up anyhow and the rest will follow.

A belief in God may not be fully within me anymore, but there's still a belief in belief. The high drama and power of the Church has stayed with me. As a child in church, I saw grown men at the altar crying out for God's mercy. And the idea of someone doing that has become a joke in the popular culture, but when you are there and you see it, you experience - for a moment - an incredibly raw, honest, strange insight into what it means to be a human being. Those experiences don't leave you. Whatever you think of them, they are powerful experiences.

Voice isn't fixed or unmalleable, it adapts to the characters you are creating and the story being told. I suppose in some way that's true in life - a little flexibility goes a long way.

I couldn't imagine a book with many characters in it and one of them not being gay. It would have felt like a glaring and problematic omission for me. But I also wanted to write that character as a person, not just a gay person.