Maybe love, like suffering, is relative.

In some ways all of my fiction is like a conversation I'm having with the writers I read when I was first falling in love with books.

A lot of time, with stories, I'll start out with a title and try to dream myself into the story that it evokes - a kind of subconscious exercise in which I'm trawling for some kind of entryway into fiction.

A novel requires a certain kind of world-building and also a certain kind of closure, ultimately. Whereas with a short story you have this sense that there are hinges that the reader doesn't see.

Writing short stories was kind of like I was cheating the whole time, in some way. I went back and forth between writing the novels and sort of sneaking out to work on stories occasionally. These stories were written over the last 10 years or so, as I was taking breaks from the novels I've written.

I always worry that knowing too much about a novel or a story early on in writing will close it down - it feels fatalistic in some way.

In the end, there probably isn't much difference between being in love and acting like you're in love.