I often felt myself to be an outsider, which is great training for all writers.

If you're short on time, that would be the two-word version of our story: we fell.

And I do think that great fiction, even when it's comedic, has an urgency or an inevitability to it, a sense that the writer absolutely had to write this particular story in this way.

I think that's the real horror story for me, how little you can ever really know about your own motivations. How in the dark we all are about the concerns and the contents of our minds.

I do think that I have a more flexible view of the interactions between people, and between human and non-human protagonists, humans and their landscapes.

For me, the term "literary fiction" means there's always attention paid to language, and linguistic experimentation, sophistication.

Much of the way books get classified has to do with marketing decisions. I think it's more useful to think of literary books and sci-fi/fantasy books as existing on a continuum. To oppose them, to suggest that one category excludes the other, always feels bogus to me. The great Leonard Michaels line is "I wanted proximity to darkness, strangeness"? That's what I'd say I want from a book, regardless of where it falls on the fantastical spectrum - that suspense connected to a particular human character, rather than just some mechanized plot.