On Following Instead of Fighting
How do you find the discipline to keep writing? Especially through patches when, for whatever reason, the material resists you?
On Pantser First Drafts
I’m about 75% pantser. I can intuit dim outlines; I usually know more or less where I'll end up but have no idea how to get there.
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.