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

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

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.

Bruce Lee, before he fought, he would try to visualize how the fight would go, because he was visualizing a victorious path out of the combat.

Much of the visualizing is imaginative.

If you die without agency as a child, but you have agency in your body [in the novel], how is it to be enacted unless it is being reimagined by a writer?

People who are suffering have to visualize ways out of tragedy to actually get out of it.