I find it only natural for a storyteller to be interested in storytelling and, for anyone who spends the better part of his or her life writing fiction, it is hardly surprising that the pleasures, worries, and mechanics of fiction-making should enter the work.

Eventually, I came to believe, stupidly, that I had exhausted that story's "original" form with its single use. I went on to other stories, other forms and genres.

I'm too ambitious to give another man credit, even if that other man is only myself in disguise.

I don't know about ground rules; but I create the world that arrives with the characters or situation or voice in my head that instigates the piece, whatever form it may take.

I tell myself that, regardless of what source I draw on, I'm writing a new work for reasons peculiar to me and not an adaptation, and so feel, in the end, justified in singing it my way.

Theatre aside, my penchant for the extended monologue began with my reading of Browning's dramatic monologues, in high school. My inclination to adopt the form for prose was confirmed by Richard Howard's book of dramatic monologues, Untitled Subjects.

I very much like the idea of the unreliable narrator. Shaping my fictions as monologues - by introducing the "I" - allows me to be as unreliable as I like.