On writing

Occasional notes from the desk — less advice, more thinking aloud about how stories get made.

Where ideas come from (the honest version)

Not from lightning. From attention. I keep a notebook of small wrongnesses — a door that opens the wrong way, a stranger who seems to recognize me, a word that means its own opposite. Ideas are just two of those rubbing together until they spark. The trick isn't having ideas; it's noticing them, and then being patient enough to let them find each other. A running sample of that notebook, unfiltered, lives on the notebook page, if you want to see the raw material before it's been shaped into anything.

The literary and the speculative

People ask which one I write. Both, and I don't think they're really different. A ghost is grief you can see. A map of a place that doesn't exist is just hope, or dread, made literal. The speculative element isn't decoration — it's the emotional truth of the story wearing a costume so you'll finally look at it directly. Keep the people real and you can tilt the world as far as you like. The Weight of Blue is, underneath the changing painting, a very ordinary story about a woman who can't finish grieving; the painting just makes that visible enough to hold a plot.

On starting

I used to believe you had to know the ending before you could earn the beginning. I no longer believe that. Most of my first lines arrive with no idea what they're the first line of — “He saved every Monday he didn't use in a jar on the shelf” showed up on its own, and I spent three weeks finding out why. Starting, for me, is less like laying a foundation and more like following a single visible thread out of a dark room; you don't need to see the whole room, just the next foot of thread.

On voice

Voice isn't a style you put on; it's what's left after you stop imitating the writers you admire. Early drafts of almost everything I've written sound like somebody else for the first few pages — a ghost of whatever I was reading that month — until the story gets specific enough that only I could have written that particular sentence about that particular jar of unused Mondays. I've come to think revision is largely the process of finding and deleting the sentences that still sound like someone else. More on the writers behind those early echoes in influences.

On revision

The first draft is me telling myself the story. Every draft after is me getting out of its way. I cut the sentences I'm proudest of first — they're usually me performing rather than serving the story. If a paragraph is beautiful but the story doesn't need it, it belongs in the notebook, not the book.

On finishing

The hardest and most important craft skill is finishing — letting a thing be imperfect and done rather than perfect and forever unwritten. A finished flawed story exists in the world; a perfect unfinished one exists only as an excuse. I've learned to trust that the next story will fix what this one couldn't. If you want the fuller, messier version of how a single book gets from a jar of unused Mondays to a finished manuscript, that's the whole subject of process.