The key is to remember a sex scene is a scene of dramatic action and psychological development. You need to pay attention to emotion and to a charact….

The biggest problem in the fictional treatment of sex is that it's not treated as part of the story but as a pause from the story. The best sex scene….

Living in the world of the workshop, which I do as a teacher, you have to be articulate about craft. And that often involves imposing analysis on wor….

Even Jack Kerouac, who famously said, "First thought, best thought," benefited from editing. His earliest works are the most edited, and they're the ….

It's a rare memoir that can tell a story that seems brand new, but Nina Here Nor There does it. This one-of-a-kind narrator undertakes a quest that i….

But revision is a creative act, not merely an analytical imposition of rules of style on a more creative first draft. That's a myth - that the first ….

A knowledge of craft is not the enemy of creativity. You sit down to write and realize, today's going to be a really unconscious day and I'm going to….

Not a lot of contemporary fiction is written about brothers and sisters. Salinger's Franny and Zooey was an inspiration for me. In Franny and Zooey, ….

It's about transitioning from adolescence, when you live together with parents and see each other every day, to the era when you don't live together ….

I am always interested in characters who are in these kinds of transitional moments in their lives, when it's not clear where they're going to end up….

I believe in art, and more fundamentally the freedom to express one's self creatively. People don't know yet what they'll ultimately believe in or ho….

I have even taught classes on writing about sex, and I've looked closely at different writers' sex scenes. On the level of craft I've given it a lot ….

I remember being in the same position as Ruby, when I no longer believed in God as I was raised to believe. But I still am a believer - it's a person….

Knowing that we'd meet Ruby at the point where she stopped believing, I knew I was also going to have to deal with what you do with your capacity for….