How did you develop your characters in Ways To Disappear?

Within the context of scene, always. Every story, for me, begins with a snapshot—a public park at summer dusk, a hotel room with the shades drawn at noon, snow falling on a suburban street—something specific and immediate. Then I ask, who’s in that scene? What does she smell, what can she hear? At that point I’m just looking for the empirical, using the physical and sensory to figure out where she is in that moment, in that world. Is she alone, or does she wish she were, and if she’s not alone, who’s with her? So she’s born directly of and from and into that initial scene.

How did you develop your subject?

Once I have a sense of what my characters are doing in that moment, of how they came to be in the park or hotel or on the suburban street, I write their voices, what’s going through their heads—are they planning or remembering or worrying, thinking or speaking aloud? What’s their relationship, their conversation? Are they lying or telling the truth? Do they even know? And after a few paragraphs, their words tell me who they are and what they want, or don’t. (And let me interrupt myself to say that what a character doesn’t want is every bit as important as what she does.) It’s not so much that their desires reveal the subject inasmuch as their desires become the subject.

What was your editing process like for Ways To Disappear?

Both rigorous and playful. As a rule I edit a story as I go, rather than ripping through one full draft and then returning to the beginning to clean it up. I like seeing (relative) order in my rearview. But I also like to free-associate, to indulge my impulse toward rhyming or wordplay, or to riff off what a line sounds like spoken aloud and see what odd and unexpected narrative places that takes me. I give myself permission to be weird, but not sloppy or excessive. And then the trick is to make what’s weird seem inevitable, natural, and that’s by way, in part, of careful grammar and punctuation. I am mindful of adverbs and semicolons, for example, and subject-verb agreement. (Shout out to Sister Paul Marie!) Because I often employ multiple chronologies in one story, I make sure the temporal shifts are as clear as possible. I vacuum and dust and take out the trash. Good editing to me is good manners—the basic etiquette of making the reader comfortable. Or preferably, willing to endure discomfort.

How has critical and/or reader response influenced the way you think about your work?

At the risk of sounding like a smarty-pants, I can’t say that I “think about my work” as a whole—I think constantly about the story I’m writing as I’m writing it—sometimes consciously and deliberately and sometimes on a low simmer, back-burnered, just burbling along while I’m doing something else. What I don’t do, and haven’t for thirty-plus years, is solicit feedback on a work in progress. I think, at a certain point, you have to be okay with living or dying by your own instincts, and I am absolutely at that point. I’ll ask you which pair of shoes I should wear, but not whether I should change a story’s ending. And when the story is finished I don’t think about it anymore.

Portions of this Q&A were edited for clarity.