There are things you do when you're writing that are so fun to do it's almost like they're private jokes that are amusing to you but no one else is going to enjoy them nearly as much and you worry you're going to have to take them out in the end.
Fiction and nonfiction, for me, involve very different processes.
Tall people have a real advantage in the world.
For many years I didn't have health insurance.
Somehow, you can achieve a directness in the novel that you can't get anywhere else.
Looking at and shaping your own work is a very intuitive process. You see something you've written in your notebook. It's there on the page and either feels right or it doesn't, and it's hard sometimes to go beyond that and discover why it feels that way.