Plot and scene are still the hardest things for me, though I think they're the building blocks of what makes a story work.

I'm working with fragments a lot of the time and the connective tissue isn't there yet. I think of it the way comics work. You have a block here and a block here, and there's this white space in between. Somehow your mind makes the leap to connect those two blocks. Finding a way to trick your mind into connecting those blocks is one of the fun things for me about writing. You can have those leaps that will emerge into something, if you're lucky.

Imaginative empathy is one of the great gifts that humans have, and it means that we can live more than one life. We can picture what it would be like from another perspective.

My main reader was my wife Sheila, and I haven't written a lot since she died.

A lot of people work really diligently to maintain a "profile" in the writing world, but that's so hard, and so boring most of the time. So you just keep doing what you like to do, I guess, and try to enjoy it.

Writing about women's sexuality is very scary for me because I'm always afraid I'll get it wrong.

I was worried that, as a college teacher, if I wrote too much about intergenerational sex my students would be creeped out.