A story is built on characters and reasons.

Fiction demands structures and recognizable shapes. Big surprises only draw attention to the writer's hand.

Being with a small publisher has been huge. They bat for me for everything.

A story is built on characters and reasons.

I could imagine that a character could do almost anything at any time, and that was the freedom of the whole thing. But keeping track of what was plausible for certain characters [was the challenge].

I'm never going to write a whole paragraph describing what a living room looks like.

The better we are at accepting the limits of our world, the more easily we can embrace what we have.