I could spend two years cross-legged on my floor and feel like I was working.

I was in my early thirties writing about my early twenties, so there was this way of seeing my younger self from enough of a distance to have perspective but also not to feel that I had to protect myself. My dreams for myself then would have undersold myself in a way.

As a fiction writer, that's been a preoccupation of mine: Can you really just close the door and leave the past back there behind you, or is the door going to blow open at some point?

It is only with distance that we are able to turn our powers of observation on ourselves, thus fashioning stories in which we are characters.

How do we live the writer's life? There's only one simple answer: 'we write.'

At some point each day (well, most days) I unroll my mat and practice for an hour. I sit in meditation for a while. This can be five minutes or twenty minutes, but the daily practice - simply showing up for it - is centering.

I was doing a lot of yoga and learning to meditate, and I found that extremely helpful, and still do and hopefully always will.