Children exist in the worlds that adults create for them, both locally and globally, and their options are, by virtue of age, often painfully limited.
— Laura van den Berg
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.
I love noir, quite obviously.
Florida is a most unusual place. It can feel at once stifling and like anything is possible there.
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 love creating mysteries, but I am terrible at solving them.
Fiction accesses a certain kind of truth through artifice. I love to create worlds that operate on their own terms.
The kind of dystopian books that I've always loved the most are the ones where you find yourself in a world that's less scorched-earth and instead a world that has just been made different.
If I'm really rolling with a short story, I work on it everywhere and end up with a finished draft in a couple months, but a novel really demands that I step out of my life and vanish into the world of the book.
Here's something a little more personal: In my teens, I was having a hard time and ended up in a therapy group of young women, some of whom had endured terrible childhood traumas.
There's the public self that we present to the outer world. There's the private self, which maybe takes more time to access. But ultimately, what I'm most interested in as a writer is a few notches below the private self.
To me, in general, something that's really rich in terms of identity about transit spaces is that they're so intimate. Especially thinking about long international flights when we're trying to sleep on the plane - we're total strangers, but we're sleeping next to each other.
I wager we have a vast amount of literature out there that tends to the stories of men, so I've never really worried too much about attending to stories of women.
In terms of specific cinematic influences, certainly I'd recommend 'Juan de los Muertos,' and I also really love this French zombie movie - 'Les Revenants' - where the dead reanimate for no apparent reason.
I think writing, or any form of art-making, is a way to prepare for not being here. Not that we can. No amount of preparing can really ready us, in a meaningful way, for the great void that awaits us all.
As a young writer, I was sort of sailing around trying to 'find my voice' - for lack of a better term - and I was really chafing against the very minimal brand of domestic realism that I'd read so much of in college.
I once took a workshop with Jim Shepard, and he has this term, 'rate-of-revelation,' that has come to mean a lot to me: 'the pace at which we're learning crucial emotional information about the stories' central figures.' An ever-increasing rate-of-revelation is good; a stagnant r-of-r is not.
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.
I love Javier Marias; I love his novel 'Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me.'
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've always found the Write-What-You-Know axiom small and stifling.
I love many realists but very strongly resist the notion that realism presents a less stylized, more authentic version of the world.
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 have no problem quitting things, because I have a horror of boredom.
I know some writers that have a million novel ideas, but I don't.
It puzzles me when writers say they can't read fiction when they're writing fiction because they don't want to be influenced. I'm totally open to useful influence. I'm praying for it.
In fiction, we are not bound by social convention, so the things that mystify and unsettle are allowed to rise to the surface.
I realized that, for me, travel for work - I'm not speaking so much about travel for pleasure - had actually become a way of avoiding life.
Florida is a very idiosyncratic place in a lot of ways - as are many parts of our fine country, but one could say Florida is particularly idiosyncratic.
'Find Me' I think, is brooding in a very literal sense of the word in that you have all of these sort of interior storm that's growing within Joy over the course of the book and leading her to her moment. And certainly, I think there's an aspect of the supernatural.
Havana is a uniquely complicated city and contains a great many histories.
In 'The Third Hotel,' my narrator, Claire, is wrestling with this sense of perpetual unfinishedness. She's trying to make sense of her husband's death, how someone's life can just stop and not continue, and of the lack of resolution in her own inner life.
The short story has been here and is here and will be here as long as we are.
Paradoxically, the only thing that helps when I'm feeling despairing about writing is to write.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Whether it's via the monstrous or the paranormal, horror actually can really get at some of the most fundamental human questions.
I'm such a first-person writer.
I think that one thing about teaching is you're trying to communicate your thoughts about a work to a group of people who may or may not share that sentiment. This has forced me to become a lot more articulate about what I respond to and what I don't respond to in fiction.
With both novels and short stories, I think a lot in terms of character arcs, when it comes to endings.
I tend to be drawn to characters who are not rule followers, who behave in unexpected and unusual ways.
I lived in Florida until I was 22.
I think my concern is I know my voice, and I know the kinds of landscapes that interest me, so my primary concern is doing the most I can with those voices and those landscapes.
Holy cow - everything about writing a novel is hard for me.
I was born and raised in Orlando, where the economy and culture has been powerfully shaped by tourism, and so I've long been interested in how we narrate the places we visit, how the gap between what we see and what we know manifests when we're traveling.
My students are often asking me, 'What do you think are the most important qualities for a writer?' And one thing I always tells them is that it's helpful to be willing to sit in a space of uncertainty. There are entire years, especially with novels, where you really don't know where the project is going.
America loves a good comeback story!
