Between 1974 and 1984, when Harmony of the World appeared, I discovered that I couldn't write fiction without learning some basic rules of characterization. Purely language-driven fiction did not work for me. I thought the fiction I first wrote had characters in it, but when I look at it now on those days when I can bear to look at it the first thing I see is that there are none. There's a visionary world powered by great anxiety and a manic exuberance. There are nightmarish features.
Pasteboard figures wander through a world of excluded middles in cartoonish ways.
When I wrote those stories, I thought I had many wonderful sentences that stood on their own. It was never reprinted in a collection. My first ambition in this regard was to be less ambitious. I thought that since these grand schemes I had for brilliant visionary writing had turned out to be neither brilliant nor visionary, I had better do something else. The stories that I wrote as a consequence, those collected in Harmony of the World , are closely observed stories of the sort of characters whom I knew, people I had met in my twenties and early thirties in Minnesota, Michigan and western New York.