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

Even in so-called realist or conventional writing there can be defamiliarization.

Part of being a writer is feeling that constant dissatisfaction, thinking about what else you could do, and also knowing when it's time to leave a project.

Sometimes you just feel like you could work forever on something and never know when it's done.

So often we think of a wound or a loss as making a person feel more deeply, become a better person. But I don't think that always happens. I think it can constrict people's lives, especially if they don't push beyond it.

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.