I feel that if I establish the world or the premise from the first line, then I can get the reader to come with me where I want her to go.

I've always gone with Kafka's model of establishing the world from the first line, as in Kafka's famous line from Metamorphosis, "Gregor Samsa woke up from uneasy dreams to find himself transformed into a gigantic insect" (or beetle or cockroach, depending on the translation). I have to have that first line before I can go further.

As writers, we live very much in our own minds much of the time, buzzing in our unconscious spaces as we go about the business of living in the world.

Having a magical element in a realistic setting without explanation seems to me to be the hallmark of fairy tales, which present us with a kind of metaphorical look at some aspect of our lives.

As soon as you start to question your own intent while you're still in the process of discovering your story, you're in trouble because you've pulled out of that unconscious space that is so necessary in the beginning of the drafting process.

Fundamentally I think we all write the kinds of work we'd most like to read. Or we try to.

I'd say that most of life seems to me to be that way, a mixture of the mundane and the mythic, when you're living the life of the mind.