I’m not qualified to explain how it feels when my wife gives me a certain look.

For me, love is working through things when it’s not going well.

A never-ending hug.

It feels healthy and it makes your body tingle and you feel excited to be alive.

I have so many ideas and things bouncing around in my head that I’ve been wanting to write for years, but there are only so many hours in the day. I have books in me; I have stories I need to tell, both fiction and nonfiction; I have projects I want to do that would take me in different directions.

I think it would be this thing that I learned when I was writing my first book. It would be surrender to your own mediocrity, which sounds kind of sad, right?

I would say you shouldn’t waste your energy on jealousy. Ever, ever! But especially on people like me.

I think revising is the same as writing, at least when it comes to the essential truths I wrote about in “Write Like a Motherfucker.” It’s all work. It’s all part of the process. Writing and revision are not two entirely different things, even though they demand slightly different things of us.

When it comes to getting to work, my trick is to conjure my inner-nun-with-a-ruler-in-hand and simply force myself to begin. Beginning is about three-quarters of the battle for me. Once I’m into the work, it’s so much more interesting than anything happening on Facebook.

My first, most important mentor was Paulette Bates Alden, who taught at the University of Minnesota when I was a junior and senior there. I took my first fiction writing workshop from her. She was teaching in the MFA program and I was an undergrad student and such an upstart that I asked her to let me in the class. She was generous and great.