This has always bothered me, the division: as though there was something about women who write that is very different. - Annie Proulx

Petal, like a persistent song phrase, like a few stubborn lines of verse memorized in childhood. The needle was stuck.

Quoyle large, white, stumbling along going nowhere

I have never fallen in love with one of my characters. The notion is repugnant. Characters are made to carry a particular story; that is their work. The only reason one shapes a character to look as he or she does, behave and speak in a certain way, suffer particular events, is to move the story forward in a particular direction. I do not indulge characters nor give them their heads and "see where they go," and I don't understand writers who drift downriver in company with unformed characters…