[Ending] is partly drawn from a desire to shock the audience, to brutally de-romanticize what many Americans think is happening overseas. And partly drawn from my own childhood: violence and a loss of innocence. But keep in mind that, as a writer, I'm both the criminal and the victim. I'm not trying to get out of anything easy.

An initial impulse of mine was to portray the way in which a city is impacted by war. But this is vague, no? After all, how do you actually have an entire city - or country, for that matter - be a character a reader can follow? One way is by making it smaller and personalizing it, by writing specifically about the citizens and the way they contend with the reality, even minutiae, especially minutiae, of their lives.

The thematic links came a little later, after I noticed I was gravitating towards certain elements - war, city, weather. So it wasn't all planned out from the start, it came out of the process.

I sometimes have to write for a while before I figure it out, pretend that I know what I'm doing, sort of like ad-libbing on stage until you remember your line - you hope you sound convincing to the audience. The key is to have enough material, enough threads, so that there's something that can be satisfyingly drawn to a conclusion.

I don't work with an outline, except a vague one in my head, a general idea of character, place, arc... I'm like a composer with a symphony in their head: I can hear the music, I just have to figure out how to put it down on paper. But I don't always know where my stories are going when I begin.

I liked the push and pull of that, between the outer political world and the inner personal lives of the characters. It's also real life... Many of us are keenly aware of world events, but break your nose and I bet that's the main thing you'd be focused on.

The benefit of writing a collection - as opposed to a novel - is that I'm able to have some version of the war in each story without having to comment on its all-encompassing nature. Turn the page and here are new characters and new situations, but the war remains... Isn't that how life has been for us for over a decade?