Well absolutely Sondheim was an influence, because he was in many ways this door into the world of theater and he is a phenomenal composer. He’s also a phenomenal mentor.

And then Octavia, I open up her books and the protagonist is a Black girl. And both the Blackness and the youth matter here, that it was like, she was writing people who were 15 years old and who already had a sense of destiny and a sense of, the world needs to change, and I’m going to shape that. I’m going to be a part of that. And she was very solution-oriented in her writing, she was very practical in her writing, so everything is very clear. You’re not going to read Octavia and come away confused.

I wrote a little book called Screening History , in which I go in great detail into the movies that affected me growing up. This was in the years of puberty, and so on. The Prince and the Pauper , based on Mark Twain’s novel with the Mauch twins in it. All of the propaganda films I loved, because they were political.

Well, it certainly influences my manner of writing, because I always see Darwin as a model of the act of explanation and of argument; the morality, the ethics of explanation, maybe.

Totally. I’d say parents, brothers, sisters, and don’t go far beyond that for the moment. If you’ve had a long-term relationship with an agent, that’s a whole different thing, because that agent is there to care.