Character Builder

What themes did you want to explore with this collection? 
I always write about men and women and relationships, but in these stories I really let all the guards down—whatever bugged me, it came up someplace. As I say to men when I'm at readings, “Guys, this is your time. I'm sorry.” The women have their own issues, but I think they deal quite well with them and eventually come out okay. Some of the men do, and some don't. I’m also interested in a sort of dream world—not sci-fi, but I love reading something that’s based in reality and all of a sudden something happens, almost other-dimensional, and you go, whoa, wait a minute, where am I? So at some point in these stories, all of the characters have to come to grips with what is reality and what is illusion. And some of them are just delusional. 

Speaking of delusional, one of your stories is about a man who quits his finance job to start a water buffalo cheese–making business—how do you come up with such unexpected plotlines? You have to have a good imagination to write fiction, but the buffalo story came from something I had heard about. Someone had actually done that, and it struck me as so unusual, so crazy, that I wanted to pursue it. I visited farms and spoke to some very generous farmers and learned all about dairy farming, buffalos, and how mozzarella is made. The research is so important if you’re going to write about something with accuracy and believability.

Your characters are so diverse; how do you write confidently from so many different perspectives? I get bored, so I like a challenge. That's why I like to write from different voices—a man, a transgender person, a millennial, someone on the spectrum. I just like the challenge of saying, Can I do this? Let's get in that head. Let's understand them. And once you understand them, you can write about anybody, because the human condition, with all its flaws, doesn't change. I don't care where you are in the world, everyone wants to be loved, to derive satisfaction in their work and their life, to survive, to understand themselves, and to be understood. 

One story consists entirely of phone conversations between a World War II bomber and his long-lost love. What’s the key to writing believable dialogue? You have to have a good ear, and that means eavesdropping all the time. When I was a little kid, my mother thought I was doing something else, but I was always listening to her phone conversations, figuring out what was really going on with these women or that family member. I’ll be sitting in a cafe, waiting for my kids to finish a sports event, and people may think I’m writing a grocery list, but I'm actually writing down the conversation happening next to me, which is so darn interesting. I may never use it, or there may be something in there that spurs an entire story. 

What makes a good short story? Characters, to me, are everything. You don't always know them when you start to write, but once you do it's as though they're born and you suddenly know everything about them: what they'll say, what they'll wear, what their attitude would be toward anything. Then you need a challenging dilemma and some transformation in your character’s life journey, whether it’s a crisis of conscience or some psychological struggle. I also like an unexpected twist, because it keeps readers on their toes.