I usually feel something before I know it.

To have a young person speak back, to hand him the microphone for his first-person utterances, you'd have to have an imagined architecture, otherwise people would say you're putting words in their mouths.

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.

I was on the wrong side of colonization. My ancestry is mostly mired in having the colonial experience as colonized subjects, first as slaves and then as independent subjects with a post-colonial experience.

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.

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