Eliot said that "genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood." What he meant by that is, the emotional understanding comes before you understand the argument that follows later in the text.

To close the empathetic gap, you really want to get the person emotionally identifying [with your subject and characters], and then when you do that, then you want sneak in a lesson about history and about politics and whatever else you might think about.

The first hit on the nervous system is the one I'm most interested in, because I think if you hit the reader emotionally, the reader can't guarantee the lessons they would like to learn.

There's an imperative to make sure you distinguish fiction from the fact, because if the fact is doing the work, why did you do fiction? And once you raise the question of why - why do fiction? - then you have to answer it in your text as a kind of enactment of the answer.

If you created a place in air where they're breathing and running around in, and then they speak in that fictional milieu, it's perfectly authenticated because the whole world relies on you, who've made it possible.

People seem very comfortable having a kind of Cheesecake Factory-type of life.

Magical realism as a declaration in the text is usually when someone can't speak and then they must be magically reinvigorated in some way.