So I feel a real responsibility and a real desire to share process. I think it's really needed for people who want to write and are overcome by the school system's approach, which is to study a story or a novel according to its themes. I always had this bizarre notion that to be a writer you had to have something important to say. First you have the theme, and then you figure out the story to articulate the theme. Which is, of course, entirely inaccurate.
Writers never know what they're talking about.
You write the story and the story has a meaning that even you don't know. What you have to always gauge is how deeply the story affects you. How much it gets into the universals of human experience. And if it has its clutches really deeply in you, it must have something. You know, when I was flying over the prairies I had this thought.