I'm such a first-person writer.
I have no problem quitting things, because I have a horror of boredom.
Fiction accesses a certain kind of truth through artifice. I love to create worlds that operate on their own terms.
Whether it's via the monstrous or the paranormal, horror actually can really get at some of the most fundamental human questions.
I think my favorite horror films are really grounded in human psychology, which is to say I think through sort of extreme dislocations of reality.
I love creating mysteries, but I am terrible at solving them.
I think where a writer falls on the realism/non-realism continuum has a lot to do with their sight, as in, 'This is how I see the world.' And it seems my sight is off-kilter and kind of strange, but I come by that naturally; I'm not consciously pushing toward a particular point on the continuum.
I love many realists but very strongly resist the notion that realism presents a less stylized, more authentic version of the world.
When I'm absorbed in a work of fiction, time and place melts away, as though I've drifted away from my usual reality and been absorbed into another.
I lived in Boston for three years, and during that time, I wrote my first collection of stories, 'What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us;' other stories that didn't make it into the collection; and several failed novel openings.
I've always found the Write-What-You-Know axiom small and stifling.
Florida is a most unusual place. It can feel at once stifling and like anything is possible there.
When I first left Florida for Boston, I was so eager to shed my Floridian identity, perhaps some of my earlier surreal gestures felt hollow and unconvincing because they were not rising from the particular brand of the uncanny I knew best.
Unlike a novel, where you expect a different kind of arc that leaves us with a somber sense of resolution, I think a story in some ways as like a train window: being able to watch the landscape pass for a certain amount of time. And then your stop arrives, and you have to leave.
I love noir, quite obviously.
I think, in a lot of ways, if you really strip down some of the most compelling novels, in a lot of ways, they're detective stories.
I love Javier Marias; I love his novel 'Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me.'
When I was in grad school, my husband and I used to house sit for a couple in Harvard Square, so we have these amazing memories of great Cambridge summers.
In the world of the American creative writing workshop, I've encountered teachers who are tempted to place, or have actually placed, a moratorium on child narrators. Students love to write them, but children come laden with complications.
Children tell themselves stories, engage in self-delusion and fantasy, but those narratives are more evolving than calcified - and with that malleability comes both freedom and danger.
