More than novels, when I’m sitting down trying to think of a short story, I’ll sometimes think, "What is the anecdote that I tell at a dinner party that always works?" Because that could be a story; I already have a structure for it. I’ll just change it however I see fit, as if I really were able, at the dinner party, to make the story whatever I wanted. If I were a true liar, which I’m not in real life, what would I do?

The stories are often like that; the novels, not so much, because you don’t actually tell a story for three days. ... A lot of writing is just imagining another course: If you have some anecdote and you put it in someone else’s life, how would it have gone differently? I have that experience already.

–Me, quoted on Powells.com, January 12th, 2005