I’m always really influenced by who I’m reading. The main thing I like to consume is voice-driven fiction. I always gravitate toward a voice more than anything else, especially a darkly comic voice. I love hyper-specific imagery that feels like only a human who’s walked on this earth could have had this thought. And so that’s something that I tried to bring to both my poetry and to my fiction. It makes it really fun to write sentences, because you get to pick things that seem both of this world, but also kind of surprising.
I love voice-driven fiction, too.
I read a lot of interviews with novelists, and they often say something like “such and such character first came to me as a voice.” How can you refuse a character who has something personal to say?
You can’t!