It's on us to investigate ourselves for any lingering sense that we are 'giving' equality. We are not. It is already given. And not by us.

I was a big and un-ironic fan of Dear Abby when I was a kid in Chicago. I think I sort of internalized her. So I have this inner Abby: cranky, proper, folksy yet scathing, with a beehive hairdo. But that's my issue.

As Flannery O'Connor says, a person can choose what she writes but she can't choose what she makes live. Some people are really acoustic writers and so for them the secret revision is sound. Other people may revise in terms of the way a paragraph feels. There's a million ways to do it.

I understand what something short should be like. I understand beauty in that form. If I start extending, somehow I kind of lose my bearings.

As a fiction writer, one of things you learn is God lives in specificity. You know, human kindness is increased as we pursue specificity.

And I have finally realized that, you know, it's not a given that my lifespan will accommodate my writing aspirations. It could be that it would take me 12 more books at six years each to get it - which means I would have to live to be 126. Which I fully intend to do, of course.

That seems to be the definition of 'novel' for me: a story that hasn't yet discovered a way to be brief.