I was raised Unitarian, and my mother said she took us to church so that we wouldn't get religious later in life.
Can you call and thank reviewers? I always wondered that.
A downside to being a successful novelist? Wow - I can't imagine one.
Both my parents were atheists, and my grandmother was an atheist in rural Kentucky, and so they were trying to make sure that my brother and I would be atheists, too, and it worked, which doesn't mean that they didn't teach us a lot of wonder of science and of nature and the world and all of that.
Science fiction writers, when I was a kid, were a big deal.
I never wanted to be a scientist.
I hadn't meant to do the pattern of publishing short stories and then a novel. I thought, 'I'm a novelist. I know it.' But you have to kind of write a lot of bad novels before you can write a good one, I think, so I did that. But meanwhile, I loved the short stories I did.
They had a contest where they would - for some reason, someone in the past loved musical theater, and so if you wrote a musical, they would fully fund it and put it on the main stage with full costumes and a set and everything, and my roommate said we should totally do that.
I think screenplay is hard. I've tried that, and it felt really difficult; like, all the stuff I think I'm good at, like description and internal experience and memory, you can't do that - or, at least, I couldn't figure out a way.
I love going to writers' colonies in pastoral settings where there's nothing to do but either walk around or read a book or work on your book, and they all seem helpful.
Really, what you should tell a novelist is, 'Keep going until you finish the draft. Don't show it to anyone.'
Definitely for writing, what inspires me is poetry, which I have next to me all the time because I think they're doing what I'm doing, but much harder, more condensed. It's the same job, but they're more talented. All of them. So I just steal openly from them.
I don't think I'm a gay activist. I used to be.
I think, like, fiction has a place to understand those things that are hardest to understand that non-fiction can't ever get at.
An elephant funeral makes me weep every time, and so does an ad with a kid leaving home for college.
It's hard to tell if I've had writer's block because it seems to me that it's when nothing comes, but, you know, every day you stare at that computer screen, and I think, 'It's never going to happen today. How can I write three pages?' And the hours pass, and they haven't shown up, and then at the very end it always happens, so it's willpower.
For writers: don't hold back. Be weird. Be sentimental. Be melodramatic. Take the risk of being not-cool, not-hip.
Critics, how I would love if you could clear the word 'sentimental' from your minds.
I have come to this conclusion: if 'sentimentality' is lazy emotion, then the term itself is lazy criticism.
My mother taught me to ask people about the things they love.
