There's always something else to work on and different solutions to these problems in the next thing. We each have a certain set of obsessions which we each cycle through.

I don't know whose sensibility I'm responding to. Until someone starts pushing against what they've inherited and starts making their own decisions about language, it's difficult.

Giving the reader the space to move around and be active, and encourage their active response is important to me. That will connect the reader more to the text.

If a synesthetic person says the letter a is green, it can't ever be anything but green.

There's relief in white space for the reader.

I felt sure about wanting to look at a person's life that had been limited or damaged, but not necessarily ennobled, by loss.

In undergraduate classes, I often see writers who are still simply imitating. I mean, we all imitate - that's how we learn to speak or write in the first place - but they're writing a Dean Koontz novel or something.