Just because a poet said something didn’t mean it was true, only that it sounded good.

What is a scene? a) A scene starts and ends in one place at one time (the Aristotelian unities of time and place-this stuff goes waaaayyyy back). b) A scene starts in one place emotionally and ends in another place emotionally. Starts angry, ends embarrassed. Starts lovestruck, ends disgusted. c) Something happens in a scene, whereby the character cannot go back to the way things were before. Make sure to finish a scene before you go on to the next. Make something happen.

...The men eyed her with the automatic mix of curiosity, lust, and aesthetic judgment they always gave young women, subject to object, the way you'd stare at an animal. She pretended not to notice. To remind them she was a person was too much effort. Objects bore no guilt.

This is what happens when you fall in love. You're looking at a natural disaster.

How could anybody confuse truth with beauty, I thought as I looked at him. Truth came with sunken eyes, bony or scarred, decayed. Its teeth were bad, its hair gray and unkempt. While beauty was empty as a gourd, vain as a parakeet. But it had power. It smelled of musk and oranges and made you close your eyes in a prayer.

If I get ideas independently of the act of writing, they never really fit. So for me, there's no hanging out, waiting for inspiration.

I use my fiction to explore my own unconscious issues. I usually don't even know what's going on with me until I'm writing. That doesn't mean my books are autobiographical.