The core labor of my writing life is the process of coaxing characters into the world of my fiction. It’s a process analogous to a portrait painter working for that crucial moment, as Paul Klee described it, where the free inspiration of the artist must yield to the demands of the thing coming into being: now she looks at me. Edward Snow, in his study of Vermeer, talks of The Girl with the Pearl Earring as capturing its subject at exactly this instant.

In fiction, this is the moment a character becomes alive enough to play her part in telling the story. Imagine Fitzgerald working while waiting patiently for Gatsby, until he appears in that rare smile that “understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.”

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