The material dictates the approach.

My own personal experience has become more first-hand.

I'm my own "ideal reader" in the sense that I write novels that I would want to read.

It wouldn't have occurred to me that while this old white man, which is to say me, was voting for Hillary Clinton, white women were choosing an overt misogynist [Donald Trump] over the first woman president. Someone will have to explain that one to me someday.

The form is always integral to the expression of the theme or to the sheer telling of the story, and sometimes the right form is apparent to me from the outset and sometimes it isn't.

The last thing I want is that sense of artifice - rather I want the reader drawn into the story and lost in it and vested in it. So the emotional connection is everything, albeit a connection on my terms.

To me experimental fiction ultimately is about the experiment and I'm not interested in experiments for their own sake.