There is no such thing as a good writer and a bad liar.

Sophisticated readers understand that writers work out their anger, their conflicts, their endless grief and rolling list of loss, through their stories. That however mean-spirited or diabolical, it's only a story. That the darkness in the soul is shaped into type and lies there, brooding and inert, black on the page, and active, dangerous, only in the reader's mind. Actually, harmless. I am not harmless.

Scenes are alluded to but not always witnessed—because in life, one sometimes arrives late, or not at all, to the big scene, even though one feels its aftershocks for years. Conversations are overheard, but not always completely understood, and sometimes, even the eavesdropping must be abruptly curtailed—as in life.

My writing process, such as it is, consists of a lot of noodling, procrastinating, dawdling, and avoiding.