1. I am indebted to the various English teachers who would give me a 99.

2. There’s something affirming to me in the fact that language itself exists so much in excess of anything that can be described as a necessity.

3. I think a character is complex or not worth pursuing.

4. You simply know that certain things would be true, certain things would not be true.

5. You can feel the conflation of things that mean the ending is coming and there’s nothing you can do about it.

6. You get to a much better ending, I think, if you do that because you’ve put all the pieces together.

7. I like the challenge of putting an idea in words or evoking something, moving it from felt reality or whatever into language—how that happens.

8. You fail a great part of the time. Even if the language is not failing, it’s not doing what you want it to do. But I enjoy that feeling.

9. You have an idea in your mind. You feel blocked. And then you can be walking across a campus in Iowa and you think, “Of course this implies that,” and it recruits other elements into the narrative.

10. I have a feeling that I know a character, and one of the aspects of that is knowing that they are complex.