“I can describe at length every feature on the character, though I might only supply a glimpse of this on the page. So if I’m writing color into that I’m also writing texture, I’m pushing the image more than anything else.”

The High Divide, a novel about a family in peril, is haunting and tense but leavened by considerable warmth and humanity. Lin Enger writes with durable grace about a man’s quest for redemption and the human capacity for forgiveness.

I grew up with guns. For my 16th birthday, in fact, I received a .357 instead of a car. But there was nothing playful about them; they were tools.

You can’t teach talent, but you can teach people how to read strenuously and mimic the moves of rock-star writers so that they eventually accumulate a toolbox of skills.

I grew up on genre – on Westerns, spy thrillers, sci-fi, fantasy novels, horror novels. Especially horror novels.

Writing is an act of empathy. You are occupying and understanding a point of view that might be alien to your own–and work is often the keyhole through which you peer.

I have a scenario but almost always it’s entwined with at least one person to begin with. Then I sort of expand from there and I’m thinking about books novels.

My voice dropped when I was 14. And when I was 14, I might have weighed 75 pounds. So you can imagine how strange that must have been: like James Earl Jones speaking through a sock puppet.

I want to build as many worlds as possible – each a version of ours with a crack running through it – and not be anchored to any of them.

People talk about me as masculine. Because of the way I walk and talk and crank out pull-ups and smell like bacon.

I wanted it to be as multi-windowed as possible, so that the reader felt like they were seeing all the different ways in to a big haunted house.

And then once I figure out who they are I can figure out what they want and once I figure out what they want I’m able to put obstacles in the way of that desire, and that’s where plot springs from.

I think my leap into TV and movies and comics is in a way natural because I’m a visual storyteller. If you look at any one of my short stories or novels, they sort of unscroll cinematically.