I definitely feel that my brain works differently, and words come out differently, if I have a pencil in my hand, rather than if I have a keyboard.
There are very few things I would love to do other than a life of writing, and I think being a singer-songwriter and being an anthropologist are the two other things I can imagine doing.
When you have people who get angry quickly, you have to learn the rules to avoid being in that situation.
I didn't major in anthropology in college, but I do feel I had an education in different cultures very early on. My parents divorced when I was eleven, and my father immediately married a woman with three children and was with her for five years. When they got divorced, he immediately married a woman with four children. In the meantime, my mother married a man who had seven children. So I was going from one family to another between the ages of eleven and eighteen.
I had one family that used a lot of yelling and screaming, and that was very normal. Another side of my family, nobody would raise their voice at all.
I had lived in France before graduate school, but because of Spain, I had a lot of the characters go and spend a good bit of time in Spain.
You write the facts as you see them, and there isn't a lull with a lot of description. No wonder people like to write about murder mysteries and dead bodies!
I love reading fiction about people who are connecting intellectually. I find that exhilarating.
I love this idea of trying to create that intellectual eroticism. That was what I was working toward all along.
Every fictional thing I wrote gave me strength to write another and another. By the end I wasn't remaining true to anything but the story I wanted to tell.
I'm always interested in a claustrophobic situation where people might be powerless to do things.
