On Drafts
First draft: In your first draft you get to be Wild Being of the Woods. Write crazy. Stop and start, veer off, break rules, color outside the lines. Let the story discover itself. Later you can figure out what to do with it.
On Responding to an Idea
What you respond to in an idea or a prompt—what Ursula K. Le Guin called a “thought experiment”— may be big or small, clearly structural or emotionally subtle. Anything, really.