There were definitely scenes I struggled with more than others: the car accident and the thunderstorm are two that come to mind. It's difficult to write about a thunderstorm. There are only so many ways to describe it and our vocabulary is so limited. And the car accident scene required a tense, manic quality that had to be conveyed in the language, as well as the character's dialogue and actions. I was editing these scenes long after I thought I was finished with them.

I want to be able to discuss craft but I also want to teach writers to trust their instincts and learn to listen to themselves above all others.

Making all of those words work together is difficult. It took a lot of cleaning up, a lot of rewriting scenes in order to make them more vivid. I used everything - every oddity I've ever seen on the side of the road, every interesting memory I could make relevant.

I don't know what people want, really. Does somebody have to die? What is meant by resolution? These are questions that I don't quite know what to do with. That being said, I did want the characters to be changed by the end of the book. But will what they've gone through alter their lives from this point forward, i.e. will they make different (better) choices? Probably not.

To be quite honest, along with thinking and such when it comes to writing, I'm not into words like "theory." I'm a PhD dropout. No matter how many twenty-five-page papers I wrote, I never felt like I was saying much. I didn't feel like the writer of the book, whose work I was analyzing, would have been impressed. It didn't matter how much time or effort I put in.

Perhaps adding a line or two of dialogue to try to better capture an emotion. But I've found that if the story isn't there in the beginning, right from the start, I generally can't beat it into shape no matter how much rewriting I do.

It's definitely about the rhythm of the words and how they sound together, writing one sentence and then another and another and cutting something immediately if it doesn't feel true. I come from a family of musicians and - while I have no musical abilities of my own - I think I inherited a good ear.