I can't stay engaged for years with a book unless it has feelings. It can't be an idea for me - it has to be a felt thing.

Because I write intuitively and image-by-image and moment-by-moment, my writing has to be powered by feelings and emotions.

I usually feel something before I know it.

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.

Much of the visualizing is imaginative.

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.

People were always hungry, bullied, afraid, paranoid - so I just thought I'd show that in the novel in a kind of suffocating way.